Dennis Assenmacher

Hello there, I am Dennis, a computational social scientist currently working as a Post-Doc at GESIS - Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences, at the department for Computational Social Science . In 2022 I received my doctoral degree from the University of Münster, working at the Chair of Data Science: Statistics and Optimitzation. My research interest focus on harmful communication in online media. I am explicitly interested in state-of-the-art computational methods in the NLP domain, specifically focusing on developing detection mechanisms for this harmful content. In the past, I published various papers on different means of harmful online communication, such as social bots (automated social media accounts) and abusive language.

Building sophisticated models that are able to detect harmful online content relies not only on state-of-the-art machine-learning methods but also on the underlying training data. Data quality, including data availability and appropriate construct definitions, are therefore important variables that impact the predictive power of models, especially when social media data are concerned. I explore all of these data quality aspects within my research from different perspectives.

If you are interested in my work, I recommend checking out the publications section.

Apart from my academic life, I am quite interested in 3D printing and micro-controller DIY projects. I am a vivid fan of flight simulation, and on rainy weekends you will probably find me in my (virtual) A320 approaching EGLL on 27L. Maybe someday, I will be flying my own plane (of course, on a smaller scale).

Academic Career

 
 
 
 
 
GESIS - Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences
PostDoc
GESIS - Leibnitz Institute for the Social Sciences
January 2022 – Present Germany
Project: Digital Dehumanization: Measurements, Exposure and Prevalence
 
 
 
 
 
University of Münster
Doctoral Studies (Dr.rer.pol)
University of Münster
April 2017 – November 2021 Münster
Dissertation Data Analytics for Harmful Online Communication in Social Media
 
 
 
 
 
University of Münster
B.Sc + M.Sc. Information Systems
University of Münster
January 2011 – April 2017 Münster

Current Projects

Hybrid Intelligence to monitor, promote and analyse transformations in good democracy practices (HYBRIDS)
Fake news, disinformation and hate speech online are pervasive and exacerbating societal tensions. Amidst growing concern that this harmful rhetoric is inciting violence and driving extremism, a global strategy to counter this digital phenomenon is more important than ever.
Dehumanization Online: Measurement and Consequences (DeHum)
Measuring dehumanization in English and German texts.

More Recent Publications

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(2023). Invasion@ Ukraine: Providing and Describing a Twitter Streaming Dataset That Captures the Outbreak of War Between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.

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(2023). Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data. arXiv.

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(2023). The End of the Rehydration Era - The Problem of Sharing Harmful Twitter Research Data. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web and Social Media. NEATCLasS, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAI).

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(2022). Artificial social media campaign creation for benchmarking and challenging detection approaches. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web and Social Media. NEATCLasS, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAI), Hybrid: Atlanta, Georgia, US and Online..

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(2022). Benchmarking Crisis in Social Media Analytics: A Solution for the Data-Sharing Problem. Social Science Computer Review.

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Contact

Are you interested in a collaboration on investigating harmful online communication? You can always reach me through Twitter or ResearchGate . You can also drop me an e-mail using the following address

contact[at]dennisassenmacher[dot].de