I'm Anastasia Giachanou

I am postdoc fellow at the Human Data Science group at Utrecht University . Before that, I was a postdoc at Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research center the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) working on the topic of fake news detection on social media. I received my Ph.D. from the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, in Switzerland where I was a member of the Information Retrieval group working on the topic of tracking sentiment over time.

I am particularly interested in research topics of Natural Language Processing, Social Media Analysis and Computational Social Science. My currest research interests include advancing social science with NLP, fake news detection, bot detection, fact checking, and sentiment analysis. Other research interests include temporal opinion mining, professional search, and user experience.

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Research

Projects

  • Early Fake News Detection on Social Media: Early postdoc fellowship by Swiss National Foundation (Dec. 2018 - May 2020)

Tutorials

  • Tutorial on "The Battle Against Online Harmful Information: The Cases of Fake News and Hate Speech" at the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (website of the tutorial)

Community Service

  • Journal Editorial Board: Information Processing and Management (IP&M)
  • PC member: SIGIR 2021, ECIR 2021, ECAI 2020, ECIR 2020, SIGIR 2019, NewsIR 2019, SIGIR 2018, NewsIR 2018, ECIR 2017, ECIR 2016, CIKM 2016
  • Journal Reviewer: Information Processing and Management (IP&M), Journal of Information Systems (JIS), International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA), Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM)
  • Reviewer: JCDL 2018, TPDL 2017, ICTIR 2017, CIKM 2017, SIGIR 2017, ICADL 2016, ECIR 2015, KDD 2015
  • Student Volunteer: SIGIR 2016
  • Local Organizer: IIR 2017

Research Interests

  • NLP for social science
  • Fake news derection
  • Personality detection
  • Hate speech detection
  • Emotion recognition
  • User profiling in social media
  • Information retrieval
  • ...

Short bio

After my B.Sc. at Aristoteleio University of Thessaloniki (faculty of Computer Science) and my M.Sc. at University of Glasgow (faculty of Computer Science), I started my research career at the University of Macedonia where I carried out research on Patent Retrieval using Distributed Information Retrieval approaches. I continued as a Ph.D. student at the Information Retrieval group at the Università della Szvizzera italiana, under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Crestani. During my Ph.D. I attended several summer schools, conferences and I did research visits. In particular, I did a research visit at the NLP & IR Group at the Universidad Nacional de Educaciòn a Distancia under the supervision of Prof. Julio Gonzalo. In addition, I visited the Natural Language and Engineering Lab (NLEL) at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Rosso. This visit resulted in two publications at CLiC-it and ICWSM. Also, as a Ph.D student I assisted MSc and BSc students with their course projects, presented tutorials, and taught practical classes, activities.

As a postdoc fellow at the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) at UPV I work on fake news detection using content and user information. In particular, I develop deep learning approaches to address the problem of fake news detection. Also, I co-supervise a Ph.D. student working on hate speech detection.

Since September 2020, I joined the Human Data Science group at the Methodology and Statistics department at Utrecht University as a postdoc researcher. My current research focuses on advancing NLP for social scientists, while I keep working on bias and fake news detection. Also, I am involved in teaching activities and consulation.

My Publications

  • URL Gretel Liz De la Peña Sarracén, Paolo Rosso, Anastasia Giachanou. PRHLT-UPV at SemEval-2020 task 8: Study of multimodal techniques for memes analysis. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Semantic Evaluation. SemEval 2020
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Guobiao Zhang, Paolo Rosso. Multimodal multi-image fake news detection. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, DSAA 2020
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Guobiao Zhang, Paolo Rosso. Multimodal fake news detection with textual, visual and semantic information. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2020
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Esteban A Ríssola, Bilal Ghanem, Fabio Crestani, Paolo Rosso. The role of personality and linguistic patterns in discriminating between fake news spreaders and fact checkers. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2020
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Paolo Rosso. The battle against online harmful information: The cases of fake news and hate speech In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, CIKM 2020
  • URL Francisco Rangel, Anastasia Giachanou, Bilal Ghanem, Paolo Rosso. Overview of the 8th author profiling task at PAN 2020: profiling fake news spreaders on Twitter. In Proceedings of the International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, CLEF, 2020
  • URL Janek Bevendorff, Bilal Ghanem, Anastasia Giachanou, Mike Kestemont, Enrique Manjavacas, Ilia Markov, Maximilian Mayerl, Martin Potthast, Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Günther Specht, Efstathios Stamatatos, Benno Stein, Matti Wiegmann, and Eva Zangerle. Overview of PAN 2020: Authorship verification, celebrity profiling, profiling fake news spreaders on Twitter, and style change detection. In Proceedings of the International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, CLEF, 2020
  • URL Janek Bevendorff, Bilal Ghanem, Anastasia Giachanou, Mike Kestemont, Enrique Manjavacas, Martin Potthast, Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Günther Specht, Efstathios Stamatatos, Benno Stein, Matti Wiegmann, Eva Zangerle. Shared tasks on authorship analysis at PAN 2020 European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2020
  • URL Niels van Berkel, Eleftherios Papachristos, Anastasia Giachanou, Simo Hosio, and Mikael B Skov. A systematic assessment of national artificial intelligence policies: Perspectives from the nordics and beyond. In Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2020
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Julio Gonzalo, and Fabio Crestani. Propagating sentiment signals for estimating reputation polarity. Information Processing and Management, 56(6), 2019
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Paolo Rosso, and Fabio Crestani. Emotional signals for credibility detection. In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR ’19, pages 877–880, Paris, France, 2019. ACM
  • URL Bilal Ghanem, Goran Glavaš, Anastasia Giachanou, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Paolo Rosso, and Francisco Rangel. UPV-UMA at CheckThat! Lab: Verifying arabic claims using a cross lingual approach. In Proceedings of the CheckThat!@CLEF 2019, 2019
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Bilal Ghanem. Bot and gender detection using textual and stylistic information. In Proceedings of the PAN@CLEF 2019, 2019
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou. Tracking public opinion on social media. PhD thesis, Universita della Svizzera italiana, 2018
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Paolo Rosso, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. Early commenting features for emotional reactions prediction. In Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2018, pages 168–182, Lima, Peru, 2018. Springer
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Ida Mele, Paolo Rosso, and Fabio Crestani. Emotional influence prediction of news posts. In Proceedings of the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM ’18, Palo Alto, California, USA, 2018
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Paolo Rosso, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. Emotional reactions prediction of news posts. In Proceedings of the 9th Italian Information Retrieval Workshop, IIR 2018, pages 168–182, Rome, Italy, 2018. CEUR-WS
  • URL Esteban Rissola, Anastasia Giachanou, and Fabio Crestani. USI-IR at IEST 2018: Sequence modeling and pseudo-relevance feedback for implicit emotion detection. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 231–234, Brussels, Belgium, 2018. ACL
  • Oral Alessandro Lomi, Anastasia Giachanou, Fabio Crestani, and Spyros Angelopoulos. Table for two: Explaining variations in the evaluation of authenticity by restaurant critics. In the 12th Organization Studies Workshop: Food Organizing Matters: Paradoxes, Problems and Potentialities, OSW ’17, Chania, Greece, 2018
  • URL Norbert Fuhr, Anastasia Giachanou, Gregory Grefenstette, Iryna Gurevych, Andreas Hanselowski, Kalervo Jarvelin, Rosie Jones, Yiqun Liu, Josiane Mothe, Wolfgang Nejdi, Isabella Peters, and Benno Stein. An information nutritional label for online documents. SIGIR Forum, 51(3), December 2017
  • URL Kasturi Dewi Varathan, Anastasia Giachanou, and Fabio Crestani. Comparative opinion mining: a review. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(4):811–829, 2017
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Francisco Rangel, Fabio Crestani, and Paolo Rosso. Emerging sentiment language model for emotion detection. In Proceedings of the 4th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, CLiC-it ’17, pages 1–6, Rome, Italy, 2017. CEUR-WS
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. A collection for detecting triggers of sentiment spikes. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR ’17, pages 1249–1252, Tokyo, Japan, 2017. ACM
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Julio Gonzalo, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. Sentiment propagation for predicting reputation polarity. In Proceedings of the 39th European Conference on Advances in Information Retrieval, ECIR ’17, pages 226–238, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 2017. Springer
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. USI participation at SMERP 2017 text summarization task. In Proceedings of the 1st Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness Workshop (Data Challenge Track), SMERP ’17, pages 99–103, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 2017
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Ida Mele, and Fabio Crestani. USI participation at SMERP 2017 text retrieval task. In Proceedings of the 1st Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness (SMERP) Workshop (Data Challenge Track), SMERP ’17, pages 52– 60, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 2017
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Fabio Crestani. Like it or not: A survey of twitter sentiment analysis methods. ACM Computing Surveys, 49(2):28, 2016
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Fabio Crestani. Explaining sentiment spikes in twitter. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM ’16, pages 2263–2268, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, 2016. ACM
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Fabio Crestani. Tracking sentiment by time series analysis. In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR ’16, pages 1037–1040, Pisa, Italy, 2016. ACM
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Morgan Harvey, and Fabio Crestani. Topic-specific stylistic variations for opinion retrieval on twitter. In Proceedings of the 38th European Conference on Advances in Information Retrieval, ECIR ’16, pages 466–478, Padua, Italy, 2016. Springer
  • URL Kasturi Dewi Varathan, Anastasia Giachanou, and Fabio Crestani. Temporal analysis of comparative opinion mining. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, ICADL ’16, pages 311–322, Tsukuba, Japan, 2016. Springer
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Fabio Crestani. Opinion retrieval in twitter using stylistic variations. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC ’16, pages 1077–1079, Pisa, Italy, 2016. ACM
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Fabio Crestani. Opinion retrieval in twitter: Is proximity effective? In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC ’16, pages 1146–1151, Pisa, Italy, 2016. ACM
  • URL Mohammad Aliannejadi, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Anastasia Giachanou, and Fabio Crestani. University of lugano at TREC 2015: Contextual suggestion and temporal summarization tracks. In Proceedings of the 24th Text REtrieval Conference, TREC ’15, pages 1–6, Gaithers- burg, Maryland, USA, 2015
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Michail Salampasis, and Georgios Paltoglou. Multilayer source selection as a tool for supporting patent search and classification. Information Retrieval Journal, 18(6):559–585, 2015
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou and Michail Salampasis. IPC selection using collection selection algorithms. In Proceedings of the 2014 Information Retrieval Facility Conference, IRFC ’14, pages 41–52, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014. Springer
  • URL Michail Salampasis, Anastasia Giachanou, and Allan Hanbury. An evaluation of an in- teractive federated patent search system. In Proceedings of the 2014 Information Retrieval Facility Conference, IRFC ’14, pages 120–131, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014. Springer
  • URL Georgios Paltoglou and Anastasia Giachanou. Opinion retrieval: Searching for opinions in social media. In Professional Search in the Modern World, pages 193–214. Springer, 2014
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Ilya Markov, and Fabio Crestani. Opinions in federated search: University of Lugano at TREC 2014 federated web search track. In Proceedings of the 23rd Text REtrieval Conference, TREC ’14, pages 1–8, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, 2014
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Michail Salampasis, Maya Satratzemi, and Nikolaos Samaras. A user-centered evaluation of a web based patent classification tool. In Proceedings of the MindTheGap@iConference 2014 Workshop (in conjuction with iConference 2014), pages 6– 11, Berlin, Germany, 2014
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Michail Salampasis, and Georgios Paltoglou. Multilayer collection selection and search of topically organized patents. In Proceedings of the Integrating IR Technologies for Professional Search Workshop (in conjuction with ECIR 2013), IRPS ’13, pages 48–56, Moscow, Russian Federation, 2013
  • URL Michail Salampasis, Georgios Paltoglou, and Anastasia Giachanou. Using social media for continuous monitoring and mining of consumer behaviour. International Journal of Electronic Business, 11(1):85–96, 2013
  • URL Anastasia Giachanou, Michail Salampasis, Maya Satratzemi, and Nikolaos Samaras. Report on the CLEF-IP 2013 experiments: Multilayer collection selection on topically organized patents. In Proceedings of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop), CLEF ’13, pages 1–12, Valencia, Spain, 2013
  • URL Michail Salampasis, Georgios Paltoglou, and Anastasia Giahanou. Report on the CLEF IP 2012 experiments: Search of topically organized patents. In Proceedings of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop), CLEF ’12, pages 1–11, Rome, Italy, 2012
  • URL Michail Salampasis, Georgios Paltoglou, and Anastasia Giahanou. Using social media for continuous monitoring and mining of consumer behaviour. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Agriculture, Food and Environment, HAICTA ’11, pages 193–202, Skiathos, Greece, 2011. CEUR-WS

    • Teaching

    • Fall 2020: Data Wrangling and Analysis, M.Sc., Faculty of Science, UU
    • Spring 2018: Business Intelligence, M.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Fall 2017/18: Programming Fundamentals, 1st year B.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Fall 2016/17: Human-Computer Interaction Design, M.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Spring 2016: Data Analytics, M.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Fall 2015/16: Information Retrieval, 3rd year B.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Spring 2015: Data Analytics, M.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI
    • Fall 2014/15: Fundamentals of Informatics, M.Sc., Faculty of Informatics, USI

    Resources

    • A Collection for Detecting Triggers of Sentiment Spikes
      This collection is described in the paper: Giachanou, A., Mele, I., & Crestani, F. 2017. A Collection for Detecting Triggers of Sentiment Spikes. In SIGIR'17. Tokyo, Japan
      This collection can only be used for research purposes. If you are interested in having access to this data, please fill the following user agreement and send it to