Dennis Assenmacher

Hello there, I am Dennis, a computational social scientist currently working as a Post-Doc at GESIS - Leibniz 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 Optimization.

Research Focus

I investigate the impact of digital technologies on communication spaces and societal discourses, aiming to create technological frameworks that enable safe, constructive, and fair expression of opinions—free from hate, discrimination, violence, and systematic manipulation.

My research focuses on harmful communication in online media, including:

• Detection of complex phenomena such as hate speech, sexism, and dehumanization
• Methodological approaches for analyzing large-scale social data
• Data quality and annotation for sustainable use of digital behavioral data
• Multilingual and multimodal challenges in digital communication
• LLM capabilities and limitations for simulating different human perspectives
• Bias identification and mitigation in AI systems and training data

Research Approach

I investigate how digital behavioral data—particularly in the context of harmful online communication—can be efficiently captured, processed, annotated, and sustainably utilized. My work focuses on developing responsible, transparent, and methodologically sound approaches to analyzing digital communication spaces, addressing challenges such as subjectivity, multilingualism, multimodality, and the volatility of digital communication forms.

I aim to bridge machine learning, social science data analysis, and ethical considerations to enable a deeper understanding of the interactions between technology, society, and public opinion formation.

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