31.481, Calls: English; Indo-European; Comp Ling/France

Mon Feb 3 16:02:04 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-481. Mon Feb 03 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.481, Calls: English; Indo-European; Comp Ling/France

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Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2020 11:01:22
From: Archna Bhatia [abhatia at ihmc.us]
Subject: First International Workshop on Social Threats in Online Conversations: Understanding and Management

Full Title: First International Workshop on Social Threats in Online Conversations: Understanding and Management (STOC 2020) 
Short Title: STOC-2020 

Date: 11-May-2020 - 11-May-2020
Location: Marseílle, France 
Contact Person: Archna Bhatia
Meeting Email: abhatia at ihmc.us
Web Site: https://social-threats.github.io 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Language Family(ies): Indo-European 

Call Deadline: 14-Feb-2020 

Meeting Description:

STOC 2020 is a one-day workshop focusing on research involving identification,
understanding and management of social threats in online conversations. The
workshop encourages discussions among researchers in various fields including
NLP, computational linguistics, linguistics, computational sociolinguistics,
ethnomethodology/conversation analysis, cybersecurity and social computing
among others. The workshop schedule will consist of two keynote talks, a
number of oral presentations, and a poster session. Depending on the volume of
contributions, papers that describe systems or tools will be invited to give a
demo of their system during the poster session. Additionally, a panel
discussion is planned to discuss high-level questions about this evolving
field, e.g., important near-term problems and types of shared tasks that drive
the field.

Social threats for individuals and organizations are prevalent in online
conversations, where human vulnerabilities pave the way for phishing,
propaganda, scams, disinformation campaigns, and social engineering tactics
(Bakhshi, Papadaki, and Furnell 2008, Karakasilitiosis, Furnell, and Papadaki
2007). For example, over 80% of cyber penetrations start with a social
engineering attack (Verizon/TM 2014), often through manipulative language
usage, resulting in a loss of money, sensitive information, or control of
resources to unsuspecting victims at an individual level. Detection techniques
based on metadata have yielded minimal success in the face of rising
personalized attacks, especially those involving impersonation and power
relationships (e.g., a spoofed dean requesting a gift card purchase from a
department faculty). The implications are potentially more dire for
disinformation campaigns, as these are implemented on a much larger scale.
Natural language processing (NLP) and computational sociolinguistics
techniques in conjunction with metadata analysis can provide a better means
for detecting and countering attacks and disinformation campaigns in a wide
variety of online, conversational contexts (Dalton et al 2019, Kim et al 2018,
Dalton et al 2017, Sawa et al 2016). STOC is a venue for discussions on
developing resources for and enabling NLP and computational sociolinguistics
research on detecting and countering such attacks for a wide variety of online
conversations.

Call for Papers: 

The topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:

 - Development and evaluation of corpora to study social engineering threats
and attacks in various forms of online communication, such as emails, SMS,
slack, Whatsapp and LinkedIn
 - Development and evaluation of corpora to study large scale influence and
disinformation campaigns targeting specific communities via social media
- Challenges in developing corpora for social engineering attacks and
disinformation campaigns
 - Advances in NLP for understanding online conversations and social
engineering contexts, e.g., semantic parsing, information retrieval and
question answering
 - Detection of social threats at different scales, e.g., from mass phishing
attacks to targeted social engineering against individuals and businesses to
sophisticated disinformation campaigns against entire populations
 - NLP based mitigation techniques for social engineering attacks (e.g.,
verification of provenance) and for disinformation campaigns (e.g., counter
messaging)
 - Dialogue/narrative understanding and generation for bots to counter social
engineering attacks
 - Strategies for countering unfolding disinformation campaigns to slow and
stop their progress
 - Automatic detection of actions and intentions of participants in online
conversations, e.g., the implied “ask” in the sentence, ''Your vote here will
result in eligibility for a $500 prize.''  
 - Automatic detection of the “provocation” underlying a disinformation
campaign and the socio-cognitive vulnerabilities of the target population it
aims to exploit
 - Natural language generation techniques to enable bot development for
controlled, goal-directed and yet natural sounding conversations with
potential adversaries and their followers
 - Active and passive defense mechanisms used for development of
conversational bots
 - Risk and trust models for operating NLP bots with discretion and autonomy
to engage with an adversary or an adversary’s followers
 - Persuasion techniques used in dialogue/narrative in social engineering
contexts and in disinformation campaigns
 - Identification of attitudes that adversaries attempt to induce in targets
for compliance
 - Techniques to induce attitudes in the adversaries or their followers,
through a range of different counter measures
 - Social impact of disinformation campaigns, social engineering attacks,
persuasion techniques, etc. using language and communication strategies
 - Evaluation of the impact of different types of social engineering attacks
and disinformation campaigns

Long (8pp) and short (4pp) papers involving original research are invited. All
submissions must follow the LREC Stylesheet which can be found here:
https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/. The papers will
be submitted electronically in PDF format through the START conference manager
page here: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/STOC2020/. All papers will be
reviewed by three Program Committee members. 

IMPORTANT DATES:
• Paper submission deadline: February 14, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: March 13, 2020
• Early-bird registration for the main conference and workshops: March 12,
2020
• Camera-ready papers: April 2, 2020
• STOC Workshop: May 11, 2020

CONTACT:
Organizing Committee at stoc2020 at googlegroups.com

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-481	
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