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 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 - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
PostDoc
GESIS - Leibniz 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.

All Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2024). AI-Generated Faces in the Real World: A Large-Scale Case Study of Twitter Profile Images. Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks.

PDF Cite

(2024). The Unseen Targets of Hate: A Systematic Review of Hateful Communication Datasets. Social Science Computer Review.

Cite Project

(2024). You Are a Bot! – Studying the Development of Bot Accusations on Twitter. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.

Cite Project DOI URL

(2024). Sexism Detection on a Data Diet. Companion Publication of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference.

Cite Project

(2023). People Make Better Edits: Measuring the Efficacy of LLM-Generated Counterfactually Augmented Data for Harmful Language Detection. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Cite DOI URL

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