FACTOR is pleased to announce our final talk of the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe (Computing, SPS):

TITLE
Offensive or Not? Are we doing offensive language detection in the correct way?

ABSTRACT
Offensive speech on web platforms is a persistent problem with wide-ranging impacts. There are many automatic content moderation systems that detect offensive content on web platforms. However, among many reasons why these tools fail to eliminate the problem is the reality that people often disagree on what is offensive.

In this talk, I will talk about how content moderation issues arise in political discussions, how machine and human moderators disagree on what is offensive when it comes to real-world social web political discourse and how content moderation research should address them. I will then present my broader vision of integrating this idea into other subjective natural language processing tasks.

TIME & PLACE

W18, 1500-1550, Thu 06th Mar 2025, Bowland North SR10. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Ellen Roberts (LAEL, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Jingle jangle fallacies: observations and learnings from a replication of Biber (1988)

ABSTRACT

Multidimensional analysis (MDA) is a well-established method for the study of textual linguistic variation. It is a method that is often used for register analyses and has been suggested as a means of explaining authorship differences (Grieve 2023). However, the process of conducting an MDA is not straightforward and some replications of the method have failed to reproduce results from other studies (Lee 2000). Recent publications have provided ‘how-to’ guidance on conducting the MDA method across a range of software to try to clarify the methodological process (Egbert and Staples 2019). But how successful has this clarification been?

This talk outlines some of the learnings and pitfalls from an attempted replication of the MDA statistical method of choice, Factor Analysis, as part of my PhD research. This research draws on the psychological notion of jingle and jangle fallacies to explore possible misconceptions in the implementation of factor analysis, following Grieder and Steiner (2022).

More broadly, this presentation aims to demonstrate via this case study, the importance of methodological transparency and sensitivity across different statistical software used across the social sciences and in forensics research more widely.

TIME & PLACE

W15, 1500-1550, Thu 13th Feb 2025, Welcome Centre LT1 (A34). (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.