#RDSM2018

2nd International Workshop on Rumours and Deception in Social Media (RDSM)

October 22, 2018 in Turin, Italy
Collocated with CIKM’2018

Abstract

The 2nd edition of the RDSM workshop will particularly focus on online information disorder and its interplay with public opinion formation. Information disorder has been categorised into three types: (1) misinformation, an honest mistake in information sharing, (2) disinformation, deliberate spreading of inaccurate information, and (3) malinformation, accurate information that is intended to harm others, such as leaks. The spread of this information can play an important role in shaping public opinion, as well as the formation of public opinion can feed back into the production and sharing of information disorder.

The challenges posed by online information disorder and its ability to shape public opinion has evoked the occurrence of important political phenomena of worldwide impact in recent events. This is the case of recent political events such as Brexit and Trump’s election, where social media played a significant role in shaping public opinion and issues now known as “fake news” and “post-truth” had an impact that is yet to be understood.

Workshop Theme and Topics

It is a fact that social media is an excellent resource of mining all kind of information varying from opinions to actual facts. However, it is also fact that not all pieces of information are reliable and thus their truth is highly questionable. One such category of information types are rumours where the veracity level is not known at the time of posting. Although rumours can be true many of them are classified as false and such false rumours are a powerful tool used to manipulate public opinion. It is therefore very important to detect and verify false rumours before they are spread and influence the public opinion. In this workshop the aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in social media mining and analysis to deal with the emerging issues of rumour veracity assessment and manipulation of public opinion.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Detection and tracking of rumours.
Rumour veracity classification.
Fact-checking social media.
Detection and analysis of disinformation, hoaxes and fake news.
Stance detection in social media.
Qualitative user studies assessing the use of social media.
Bots detection in social media.
Measuring public opinion through social media.
Assessing the impact of social media in public opinion.
Political analyses of social media.
Real-time social media mining.
NLP for social media analysis.
Network analysis and diffusion of dis/misinformation.

Workshop Program Format

We we will accept both full (max. 10 pages) and short/position papers (2-4 pages) to be presented as posters and demos. We will aim to have 1-2 keynote speakers, as well as a discussion at the end of the workshop to discuss open challenges and future directions in the field.

Workshop Schedule/Important Dates

Submission deadline: 20th July, 2018 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
Notification of Acceptance: 3rd August, 2018
Camera-Ready Versions Due: 27th August, 2018
Workshop date: October 22, 2018

Submission Procedure

We solicit full research papers (max. 10 pages), and short papers (max. 4 pages) both in the ACM camera-ready templates, please use sample-sigconf.tex as the template but removing the authors during submission. Full papers cannot exceed 10 pages in length and short papers cannot exceed 4 pages in length. Papers should be submitted through the EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rdsm2018

The workshop follows the same rules for the review process (see details here http://www.cikm2018.units.it/callforpaper.html).

Workshop Organizers

Ahmet Aker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
a.aker@is.inf.uni-due.de
Arkaitz Zubiaga, University of Warwick, UK
a.zubiaga@warwick.ac.uk
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
k.bontcheva@sheffield.ac.uk
Maria Liakata, University of Warwick and Alan Turing Institute, UK
m.liakata@warwick.ac.uk
Rob Procter, University of Warwick and Alan Turing Institute, UK
rob.procter@warwick.ac.uk