Description of doctoral student's silhouette

Arkadiusz Modzelewski is a doctoral student enrolled simultaneously in doctoral programs at two universities: the Brain, Mind and Computer Science program at the University of Padua and the Computer Science program at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. His enrollment in both programs is made possible by the Cotutelle agreement, which allows international visibility and prestige for his research. His research work, supervised by Prof. Adam Wierzbicki and Prof. Giovanni Da San Martino, focuses on detecting disinformation, manipulation and persuasion techniques in textual data, combining technical knowledge with social influence. Arkadiusz has presented his research at international conferences, such as the prestigious Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. He has also participated in international workshops such as SemEval and CheckThat!, achieving successful results.

Description of the subject matter of the research project

Mitigating the spread of disinformation on the Internet has become a critical societal challenge. Numerous significant events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, highlight the negative impact of disinformation on individuals and society. Disinformation often uses manipulative and persuasive techniques, making it necessary to address not only the detection of false information, but also the identification of manipulative tactics. This study addresses the complex challenge of identifying disinformation and persuasive techniques in newspaper articles and other online texts. Although the study includes multilingual texts, the main focus is on Polish to support less studied languages. The project will contribute to the development of innovative datasets and artificial intelligence tools for detecting misinformation and persuasive tactics. It will be implemented under a Cotutelle agreement between two universities: University of Padova and the Polish-Japanese Academy of Computer Technology.

Selected publications