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.

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 an avid 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).