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Research project

SafeSpacesNLP

Project overview

We will explore the use of Socio-Technical Natural Language Processing (NLP) for classifying behavioural online harms within online forum posts (e.g. bullying; drugs & alcohol abuse; gendered harassment; self-harm), especially for young people. Our socio-technical AI will explore both zero-shot and graph-based NLP algorithms for behaviour classification, using a cyclic socio-technical methodology. This approach will facilitate incremental use of human feedback for iterative learning and re-ranking, overcoming the limited training data issue and keeping a 'human in the loop'. We follow an inclusive multi-disciplinary research approach, integrating stakeholders into our experiments from the start.

Staff

Lead researchers

Dr Stuart Middleton

Associate Professor
Research interests
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Human-in-the-loop NLP: Active Learning, Adversarial Training, Rationale-based Learning, Interactive Sense Making
  • Information Extraction: Few/Zero Shot Learning, Graph-based Models, Behaviour Classification, Geoparsing/Location Extraction, Event Extraction, Argument Mining
Connect with Stuart

Email: sem03@soton.ac.uk

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs

Loitongbam Gyanendro Singh, Stuart E. Middleton, Tayyaba Azim, Elena Nichele, Pinyi Lyu & Santiago De Ossorno Garcia, 2024
Type: conference
Bernd Carsten Stahl, Virginia Portillo, Hanne Wagner, Peter J. Craigon, Dimitrios Darzentas, Santiago De Ossorno Garcia, Liz Dowthwaite, Chris Greenhalgh, Stuart E. Middleton, Elena Nichele, Christian Wagner & Helena Webb, 2024, Journal of Responsible Innovation, 11(1)
DOI:
Type: article
Daria Onitiu, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Adriane Chapman, Enrico Gerding, Stuart E. Middleton & Jennifer Williams, 2023
Type: conference
Elena Nichele, Anita Lavorgna & Stuart Middleton, 2022, SN Social Sciences, 2(10), 217
DOI:
Type: article
Tayyaba Azim, Gyanendro Singh Loitongbam & Stuart Middleton, 2022
DOI:
Type: conference