Walid Magdy
Professor
University of Edinburgh
I am a faculty member at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), part of the School of Informatics, the Univeristy of Edinburgh. I am also a faculty fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. My main expertise is in social computing, information retrieval (IR), and data mining.
Publications
"God says we are right!": The Interplay between Religion and Propaganda on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2026
Silencing & Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalations
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2026
Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'26) · 2026
Benchmarking Offensive Language Detection in Persian and Pashto
Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and LLMs for the Iranian Language Family (SilkRoadNLP 2026) · 2026
Beyond the Game: Comparing Political News Coverage and Twitter Discussions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup
Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media · 2026
Farsi Natural Language Processing: A Survey
Information Processing & Management · 2026
From Cairo to Cape Town: How African Twitter Shapes the Global Palestine-Israel Narrative
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026) · 2026
The NakbaEcho Dataset: From Oral Testimonies to a Transcribed Arabic History Corpus
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources (NakbaNLP 2026) · 2026
Validating Automatic Evaluation of Controllable Counterspeech Generation: Rankings Matter More Than Scores
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2026
IslamicEval 2025: The First Shared Task of Capturing LLMs Hallucination in Islamic Content
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference · 2025
'The Prophet said so!': On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'25) · 2025
Who Should Set the Standards? Analysing Censored Arabic Content on Facebook during the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2025
Culture Matters in Toxic Language Detection in Persian
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2025
Lexpansion: Evaluating Dictionary Based Lexicon Expansion for Social Media Analysis
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions (NLPSI 2025) · 2025
Revisiting Common Assumptions about Arabic Dialects in NLP
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2025
TwiXplorer: An Interactive Tool for Narrative Detection and Analysis in Historic Twitter Data
Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing · 2024
"Pinocchio had a Nose, You have a Network!": On Characterizing Fake News Spreaders on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'24) · 2024
Estimating the Level of Dialectness Predicts Inter-annotator Agreement in Multi-dialect Arabic Datasets
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2024
NADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task
Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference · 2024
ALDi: Quantifying the Arabic Level of Dialectness of Text
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · 2023
What Makes Good Counterspeech? A Comparison of Generation Approaches and Evaluation Metrics
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on CounterSpeech for Online Abuse (CS4OA) · 2023
DLAMA: A Framework for Curating Culturally Diverse Facts for Probing the Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 · 2023
Sarcasm Detection is Way Too Easy! An Empirical Comparison of Human and Machine Sarcasm Detection
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 · 2023
The Effect of Arabic Dialect Familiarity on Data Annotation
Proceedings of the The Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP) · 2023
Arabic Dialect Identification under Scrutiny: Limitations of Single-label Classification
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023 · 2023
Emoji are Effective Predictors of User's Demographics
Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining · 2023
Hiding opinions from machine learning
PNAS Nexus · 2022
Twitter has a Binary Privacy Setting, are Users Aware of How It Works?
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'23) · 2022
SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval, Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Proceedings of The 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2022 · 2022
SMASH at Qur’an QA 2022: Creating Better Faithful Data Splits for Low-resourced Question Answering Scenarios
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur’an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection · 2022
Should a Chatbot be Sarcastic? Understanding User Preferences Towards Sarcasm Generation
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers): Proceedings of the Conference, Vol. 1 (Long Papers) · 2022
Understanding Privacy Switching Behaviour on Twitter
Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2022
LIWC-UD: Classifying Online Slang Terms into LIWC Categories
Proceedings of WebSci'22 · 2022
Robert Elliott Smith: Rage Inside the Machine—the prejudice of algorithms, and how to stop the internet making bigots of us all
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines · 2022
AX-MABSA: A Framework for Extremely Weakly Supervised Multi-label Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · 2022
Characterizing the role of bots’ in polarized stance on social media
Social Network Analysis and Mining · 2022
Don't Take it Personally: Analyzing Gender and Age Differences in Ratings of Online Humor
Social Informatics: 13th International Conference, SocInfo 2022 · 2022
From an Authentication Question to a Public Social Event: Characterizing Birthday Sharing on Twitter
arXiv:2201.10655 [cs] · 2022
Understanding fillers may facilitate automatic sarcasm comprehension: A structural analysis of Twitter data and a participant study
Proceedings of the 26th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2022) · 2022
Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations · 2021
Atheists versus Theists: Religious Polarisation in Arab Online Communities
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021
Black or White but Never Neutral: How Readers Perceive Identity from Yellow or Skin-toned Emoji
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021
Robert Elliott Smith: Rage Inside the Machine—the prejudice of algorithms, and how to stop the internet making bigots of us all
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines · 2021
SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon, Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2021) · 2021
Stance detection on social media: State of the art and trends
Information Processing and Management · 2021
Identity Signals in Emoji do not Influence Perception of Factual Truth on Twitter
Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 2021
SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval, Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Proceedings of The 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2022 · 2021
Benchmarking Transformer-based Language Models for Arabic Sentiment and Sarcasm Detection
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop · 2021
Overview of the WANLP 2021 Shared Task on Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection in Arabic
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop · 2021
A Comparative Study of Effective Approaches for Arabic Sentiment Analysis
Information Processing and Management · 2021
Smash at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Optimizing the Hyperparameters of ERNIE 2.0 for Humor Ranking and Rating
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation · 2020
Embedding Structured Dictionary Definitions
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP · 2020
Emoji and Self-Identity in Twitter Bios
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science · 2020
Holy Tweets: Exploring the Sharing of the Quran on Twitter
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020
It's Not Just About Sad Songs: The Effect of Depression on Posting Lyrics and Quotes
SocInfo 2020: Social Informatics · 2020
Analyzing Temporal Relationships between Trending Terms on Twitter and Urban Dictionary Activity
WebSci ‘20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science · 2020
Examining the Role of Mood Patterns in Predicting Self-reported Depressive Symptoms
WebSci ‘20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science · 2020
iSarcasm: A Dataset of Intended Sarcasm
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2020
Analysing Privacy Leakage of Life Events on Twitter
WebSci ‘20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science · 2020
From Arabic Sentiment Analysis to Sarcasm Detection: The ArSarcasm Dataset
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools · 2020
Multitask Learning for Arabic Offensive Language and Hate-Speech Detection
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools · 2020
Overview of OSACT4 Arabic Offensive Language Detection Shared Task
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools · 2020
The Effect of Sociocultural Variables on Sarcasm Communication Online
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020
Towards Using Word Embedding Vector Space for Better Cohort Analysis
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 2020
Urban Dictionary Embeddings for Slang NLP Applications
Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) · 2020
Emoji Skin Tone Modifiers: Analyzing Variation in Usage on Social Media
ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC) · 2020
The Effect of User Psychology on the Content of Social Media Posts: Originality and Transitions Matter
Frontiers in Psychology · 2020
A Practical Guide for the Effective Evaluation of Twitter User Geolocation
ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC) · 2019
Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere
Social Informatics: 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019 · 2019
Assessing Sentiment of the Expressed Stance on Social Media
Social Informatics: 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019 · 2019
Your Stance is Exposed! Analysing Possible Factors for Stance Detection on Social Media
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2019
Arabic Tweet-Act: Speech Act Recognition for Arabic Asynchronous Conversations
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop · 2019
Exploring Author Context for Detecting Intended vs Perceived Sarcasm
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2019
It is more than what you Say!: Leveraging User Online Activity for Improved Stance Detection
Online Community Engagement when Talking About Infidelity: The Case of Reddit
Mazajak: An Online Arabic Sentiment Analyser
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop · 2019
ClassStrength v2: An Adaptive Multilingual Tool for Tweet Classification
2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) · 2018
How Well Did You Locate Me? Effective Evaluation of Twitter User Geolocation
2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) · 2018
Self-Representation on Twitter Using Emoji Skin Color Modifiers
Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018) · 2018
An Arabic Speech-Act and Sentiment Corpus of Tweets
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) · 2018
Multi-Dialect Arabic POS Tagging: A CRF Approach
11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · 2018
Part-of-Speech Tagging for Arabic Gulf Dialect Using Bi-LSTM
11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · 2018
BroDyn’18: Workshop on analysis of broad dynamic topics over social media
CEUR Workshop Proceedings BroDyn 2018: Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media (BroDyn 2018) co-located with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018) · 2018
Predicting Online Islamophobic Behavior after #ParisAttack
Journal of Web Science · 2017
Trump vs. Hillary: What went Viral during the 2016 US Presidential Election
9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017) · 2017
Abusive Language Detection on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online · 2017
ClassStrength: A Multilingual Tool for Tweets Classification
ASONAM 2017 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 · 2017
Fake it till you make it: Fishing for Catfishes
ASONAM 2017 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 · 2017
Improved Stance Prediction in a User Similarity Feature Space
Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 · 2017
Word-Based Correction for Retrieval of Arabic OCR Degraded Documents
String Processing and Information Retrieval: 13th International Conference, SPIRE 2006, Glasgow, UK, October 11-13, 2006, Proceedings · 2006