Research on hate speech: Computer Scientists present their work to Minister President Rehlinger

Minister President Anke Rehlinger visited Saarland University

On the occasion of the International Week Against Racism, Minister President Anke Rehlinger visited Saarland University to learn about the topic of hate speech on the Internet. Computer linguists Dr. Thomas Kleinbauer and Professor Dietrich Klakow presented a project in which algorithms for the automatic classification of hate speech were developed. Professor Ingmar Weber presented the research field of “Societal Computing” together with his doctoral student Brahmani Nutakki.

Dietrich Klakow is Professor of Spoken Language Systems at Saarland University. Thomas Kleinbauer conducted research on the processing of human speech with computers as a post-doctoral researcher at Klakow’s chair. During the prime minister’s visit, they presented results from the “M-PHASIS” project, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) with about 540,000 euros from 2019 to 2022. Aim of the project was to develop algorithms that can detect and classify hate speech in the context of migration. Press release on the project

Ingmar Weber holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence, endowed with around five million euros, since September 2022 in order to establish an interdisciplinary institute for “Societal Computing” at Saarland University. The institute will conduct research at the interface between computer science and the social sciences. During the Minister President’s visit, he and doctoral student Brahmani Nutakki presented work on “hidden” hate speech in the communication of political parties on Twitter, and they also showed projects that use publicly available data such as Facebook advertising data or satellite images to track population shifts in war-torn Ukraine. Background on the Humboldt Professorship in the press release

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
900 scientists (including 400 PhD students) and about 2500 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Four world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs cover the entire spectrum of computer science.

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Saarland Informatics Campus
Phone: +49 681 302-70741
E-Mail: pzapf@cs.uni-saarland.de