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

held in conjunction with COLING 2020
Barcelona, 13th December 2020
https://www.pheme.eu/rdsm2020/
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++ Important Dates ++

Submission deadline: 4th September, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: 9th October, 2020
Camera-Ready Due: 1st November, 2020
Workshop date: 13th December, 2020

++ Overview ++

In the last decade, social media has become the platform par excellence for all kinds of online information exchange, such as: content creation, consumption and sharing; commenting on and engaging with content posted by others; organisation of events; reporting and tracking of real world events; rating and reviewing products; catching up with the latest developments in the news; etc. Among the best known platforms today are Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Reddit and Instagram. Besides individuals, the presence of companies, agencies, institutions and politicians has also increased in social media. One of their objectives is to engage with a broader audience, while also learning from them. For instance, companies are interested in finding out what customers think about their products in order to improve their services and perform targeted advertising. Given the scale of social media use, it is also being leveraged to perform predictions on a variety of issues such as political elections, referenda and stock markets.

Although social media seems to offer a way to address all kinds of problems, it also is a source of  new problems, some of which are a serious threat to society. One of the threats is the online information disorder and its manipulative power on public opinion. 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, cyberhate, etc. Its spread can play an important role in shaping public opinion and reactions to events, which the viral properties of social media may then amplify. The influence of online information disorder has been evident in  recent political events such as Brexit and Trump’s election, where social media played a significant role in shaping public opinion and “fake news” and “post-truth” had an impact that is yet to be understood.

This is why we focused on our previous workshop editions on online information disorder and its interplay with public opinion formation. In our 3rd edition of the RDSM workshop we will continue focusing on these highly important issues. However, in addition we aim to introduce for the first time the topic proposed social media solutions tackling the aforementioned themes and thus to open up discussions around usefulness and trust of such solutions.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in social media mining and analysis to deal with the emerging issues of veracity assessment, fake news detection and manipulation of public opinion. We invite researchers and practitioners to submit papers reporting results on these issues. Qualitative user studies on the challenges encountered in the use of social media, such as the veracity of information and fake news detection, as well as papers reporting new data sets are also welcome. Finally, we also welcome studies reporting the usefulness and trust of social media tools tackling the aforementioned problems.

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 on public opinion.
* Political analyses of social media.
* Real-time social media mining.
* NLP for social media analysis.
* Network analysis and diffusion of dis/misinformation.
* Usefulness and trust analysis of social media tools.
* Benchmarking disinformation detection systems.
* Open disinformation knowledge bases and datasets.

++ Submission Guidelines ++

We invite submissions of up to nine (9) pages maximum, plus bibliography for long papers and four (4) pages, plus bibliography, for short papers. The COLING’2020 templates must be used; these are provided in LaTeX and also Microsoft Word format. Submissions will only be accepted in PDF format. Deviations from the provided templates will result in rejections without review. Submit papers by the end of the deadline day (timezone is UTC-12) via our Softconf Submission Site: http://softconf.com/coling2020/RDSM/

Download the LaTeX and MS Word templates here: https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip

Selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to the following special issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/special_issues/tackling_misinformation_online

++ Organizing committee ++

- Ahmet Aker, University of Duisburg-Essen, UK a.aker@is.inf.uni-due.de (main contact person)
- Arkaitz Zubiaga, Queen Mary University of London, UK a.zubiaga@qmul.ac.uk
- Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK k.bontcheva@sheffield.ac.uk
- Maria Liakata, Queen Mary University of London and the Alan Turing Institute, UK m.liakata@qmul.ac.uk
- Rob Procter, University of Warwick and the Alan Turing Institute, UK rob.procter@warwick.ac.uk
- Symeon Papadopoulos, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece papadop@iti.gr

++ Programme Committee ++

Pepa Atanasova, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Giannis Bekoulis, Ghent University, Belgium
Costanza Conforti, University of Cambridge, UK
Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Leon Derczynski, IT University Copenhagen, Denmark
Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, Newgiza University, Egypt
Genevieve Gorrell, University of Sheffield, UK
Elena Kochkina, University of Warwick, UK
Dominik Kowald, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Chengkai Li, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
Preslav Nakov, QCRI, Qatar
Viviana Patti, University of Turin, Italy
Georg Rehm, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield, UK
Ravi Shekhar, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Panayiotis Smeros, EPFL, Switzerland
Antonela Tommasel, UNICEN, Argentina
Adam Tsakalidis, Alan Turing Institute, UK
Onur Varol, Northeastern University, USA
Svitlana Volkova, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA