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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3138/xpreface.pdf
Overview of ROMCIR 2022:
The 2nd Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation
through Credible Information Retrieval
Marinella Petrocchia,b , Marco Vivianic
a
IIT-CNR, Via G. Moruzzi, 1 – 56124 Pisa, Italy
b
IMT School for Advanced Studies, Piazza San Francesco, 19 – 55100 Lucca, Italy
c
University of Milano-Bicocca (DISCo – IKR3 Lab), Edificio U14, Viale Sarca, 336 – 20126 Milan, Italy
Abstract
The 2022 Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR
2022), at its Second Edition as part of the Satellite Events of the 44th European Conference on Information
Retrieval (ECIR 2022), is concerned with providing users with access to genuine information, to mitigate the
information disorder phenomenon characterizing the current online environment. This problem is very broad,
as it concerns different information objects (e.g., Web pages, online accounts, social media posts, etc.) on
different platforms, and different domains and purposes (e.g., detecting fake news, retrieving genuine health-
related information, reducing propaganda and hate-speech, etc.). In this context, all those approaches that
can serve, from different perspectives, to tackle the genuine information access problem, find their place. In
particular, this year articles have been submitted that addressed the problem of preventing access to health
misinformation and assessing the genuineness of multi-modal information.
Keywords
Information Disorder, Information Genuineness, Information Retrieval, Health Misinformation,
Multi-modal Information
1. Motivations
Coming into contact with different types of misleading content that is propagated online, especially
through social media platforms [1, 2], can lead to several problems for individuals and society as a
whole, as we have experienced especially in recent years. False news can, for example, influence public
opinion in political and financial choices [3, 4]; false reviews can promote substandard products or,
on the contrary, damage florid economic activities by means on discredit campaigns [5, 6]; unverified
health information can lead people to follow behaviors that can be harmful both individually and
globally [7, 8, 9, 10] (let us think, for example, of the risk of following negationism hypotheses in the
context of the recent COVID-19 pandemic [11]).
This scenario is due to the so-called information disorder phenomenon [12], which indicates the pro-
liferation of different forms of (online) communication pollution, encompassing dis-, mis-, and mal-
information. Specifically, misinformation is the spread of false content resulting from the spreader’s
ROMCIR 2022: The 2nd Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval, held as part of
ECIR 2022: the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval
$ marinella.petrocchi@iit.cnr.it (M. Petrocchi); marco.viviani@unimib.it (M. Viviani)
https://www.iit.cnr.it/en/marinella.petrocchi (M. Petrocchi); http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/people/marco-viviani/ (M.
Viviani)
0000-0003-0591-877X (M. Petrocchi); 0000-0002-2274-9050 (M. Viviani)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073 CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
ignorance; disinformation is a form of intentional sharing of false content to produce harm; malinfor-
mation indicates the spread of (private) information that is based on reality, having the same harmful
intent (e.g., the despicable act of revenge porn).
Access to this non-genuine information is made easier and easier due to the fact that, from a tech-
nological point of view, information is produced at a speed and volume never seen before, almost
without any trusted traditional intermediary [13, 14]. Faced with this huge amount of information,
and the uncertainty associated with its degree of genuineness, human cognitive abilities are not al-
ways sufficient to take well-informed decisions [15].
In this context, it is clear that the problem of guaranteeing access to genuine information online
needs to find effective solutions, despite (and precisely because of) it is very broad, as it concerns dif-
ferent information objects (e.g., Web pages, online accounts, social media posts, etc.), different online
platforms (e.g., Web portals, social networking services, question-answering systems, etc.), and differ-
ent domains and purposes (e.g., detecting fake news, retrieving genuine health-related information,
reducing propaganda and hate-speech, etc.).
2. Scientific Objectives
Within the ECIR conference, the key goal of the Workshop is to encourage a discussion between
researchers, also belonging to different disciplines, and propose innovative approaches, about the
problem of guarantee to users access to genuine information that does not distort their perception of
reality, through Information Retrieval solutions [16]. In recent years, despite numerous approaches
have been proposed to tackle the considered issue in different contexts, and for different purposes,
we are still a long way from having found completely effective and domain-independent solutions.
The problem is still of great interest with respect to many research directions, such as the access to
and retrieval of genuine information, the early detection of dis-/mis-/mal-information, the develop-
ment of solutions that can be understood by final users (explainable AI), the study of the problem in the
health domain, the study of the relationship between security, privacy and genuineness in information
access and dissemination, the consideration of multi-modal information in assessing genuineness.
In this scenario, the role of researchers working in the fields of Information Retrieval, Social Com-
puting, Social Sciences, Data and Web Science and other related research areas, is crucial to investigate
the above-mentioned research directions.
3. Topics of Interest
All those approaches that can serve, from different perspectives, to tackle the genuine information
access problem, find their place in ROMCIR 2022. Specifically, the topics of interest include, but are
not limited to:
• Access to/retrieval of genuine information
• Bias detection
• Bot/spam/troll detection
• Computational fact-checking
• Crowdsourcing for information genuineness assessment
• Deep fakes and multi-modal misinformation detection
• Dis/misinformation detection
• Evaluation strategies in assessing dis/misinformation
• Fake news/reviews detection
• Filter bubble/echo chamber/polarization detection
• Harassment/bullying/hate-speech/propaganda detection
• Security, privacy and information genuineness
• Sentiment/emotional analysis and stance detection
• Trust and reputation systems
• Understanding and guiding the societal reaction in the presence of dis/misinformation
Both theoretical studies, model-driven, and data-driven approaches, supported by publicly available
datasets, are more than welcome.
4. Submissions
The ROMCIR 2022 Workshop received 10 submissions, of which 6 were accepted, so with an accep-
tance rate of 60%. Articles have been submitted from four different countries, i.e., Germany, India,
UK, and USA. The accepted articles, collected in these Proceedings, have primarily considered two
issues from distinct points of view. The first issue concerns access to genuine information in the
health-related domain; the second issue concerns access to multi-modal genuine information.
With respect to the first issue, in the article by Fröbe et al. entitled: “Using Keyqueries to Re-
duce Misinformation in Health-Related Search Results”, the authors investigate whether explicit rel-
evance feedback provided by experts can guide query expansion methods to formulate queries that
return fewer misleading or wrong results. In contrast to standard query expansion methods that pay
no attention to feedback document ranks in expanded query results, the authors experiment with a
keyquery-based approach to identify expanded queries for which feedback documents are ranked as
high as possible. In the article by Huang et al. entitled: “Fight Against COVID-19 Misinformation via
Clustering-Based Subset Selection Fusion Methods”, the authors try to improve the retrieval quality
of search engines w.r.t. different relevance dimensions via a data fusion technique. In particular, a
clustering-based approach is proposed for selecting a subset of IR systems from all the available ones,
for finding the most relevant, credible, and correct documents talking about COVID-19. Still in the
health domain, the article by Pankovska et al., entitled: “Suspicious Sentence Detection and Claim
Verification in the COVID-19 Domain”, addresses the claim verification and fact-check-worthiness
issues, by proposing an approach that involves a two-step claim verification procedure consisting of
a fake news detection task in the form of binary sequence classification and fact-checking using the
Google Fact Check Tools. The aim of the authors is to alert the reader that a document contains sus-
picious statements, even if no already validated similar claims exist. The last article that deals with
health misinformation, this time from a more high-level perspective, is the one by Janzen et al. enti-
tled “Cognitive security and resilience: A social-ecological model of disinformation and other harms
with applications to COVID-19 vaccine information behaviors”. In this paper, the authors propose a
novel application of Brofenbrenner’s social ecological model to the study of cognitive security and
resilience in the context of information disorder. First, they describe the refitting of the model from
public health and human development to cognitive security. Using existing literature in the field, they
identify the key factors at each level of influence that shape susceptibility and resilience to informa-
tion disorder. They also consider the dynamic interactions between individuals, groups, societies,
and characteristics of the technological environment, including how algorithms interact with indi-
vidual behaviors, policies, and organizational decision-making to shape access to and discoverability
of genuine information. Finally, they describe an application of the model to a use case involving
COVID-19-related information behaviors.
Coming to the second problem addressed by the articles submitted to ROMCIR 2022, namely that
of multi-modal genuine information access, the article by Aghada entitled: “An Alternative Approach
to Ranking Videos and Measuring Dissimilarity Between Video Content and Titles”, proposes a sta-
tistical approach to video retrieval and ranking by introducing a novel dissimilarity measure acting
on a video’s audio-visual content and its title, hence aiding in video click-bait detection. Finally,
in the paper by Kirdemir et al. entitled: “Towards Detecting Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviors on
YouTube”, the authors aim to explore new approaches to assess latent and implicit characteristics of
coordination among users in YouTube channels that can indicate manipulation of information and
communication. In particular, they propose computational models leveraging multi-step time-series
analysis of engagement trends, network structural feature-based analysis, and a combination of un-
supervised and supervised machine learning techniques.
5. Keynote Speech
As part of the Workshop, a Keynote Speech entitled “Fake News Detection: Limited Ground Truth,
Limited Text, No Understanding of Spreading Intent” was given by Reza Zafarani, on current open
issues that still concern fake news detection.
Abstract: “Fake news” is now viewed as one of the greatest threats to democracies and journalism.
The massive spread of fake news has weakened public trust in governments and its potential impact
on various political outcomes such as the Brexit is yet to be realized. We will briefly review fake news
detection techniques, along with some of the current challenges that these methods face. We will
discuss some recent advancements to tackle these challenges, particularly focusing on multi-modal
fake news analysis and assessing the intent of fake news spreaders.
Reza Zafarani is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at Syracuse University. His research interests are in
Data Mining, Machine Learning, Social Media Mining, and Social Network
Analysis. His research has been published in major academic venues and
highlighted in various scientific and news outlets. He is the principal au-
thor of “Social Media Mining: An Introduction” a textbook by Cambridge
University Press and the associate editor for SIGKDD Explorations and
Frontiers in communication. He is the winner of the NSF CAREER award,
President’s Award for Innovation, and outstanding teaching award at Ari-
zona State University. Web site: http://reza.zafarani.net/
6. Organizing Team
The ROMCIR 2022 Organizing Team was composed of the following people with respect to their
distinct roles.
6.1. Co-chairs
Marinella Petrocchi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Informat-
ics and Telematics, part of the National Research Council (IIT-CNR), Pisa,
Italy, under the Trust, Security and Privacy research unit. She collabo-
rates with the Sysma unit at IMT School for Advanced Studies, in Lucca,
Italy. Her field of research lies between Cybersecurity and Data Science.
She studies novel techniques for online fake news/fake accounts detection.
She is in the core team of the TOols for Fighting FakEs (TOFFEe) project,
funded by IMT, and WP leader in H2020 Medina, where she studies how
to automatically translate NL cloud security requirements to machine-
readable, enforceable policies. Web site: https://www.iit.cnr.it/en/marinella.petrocchi/
Marco Viviani is an Associate Professor at the University of Milano-
Bicocca, Department of Informatics, Systems, and Communication
(DISCo), Milan, Italy. He works in the Information and Knowledge Rep-
resentation, Retrieval and Reasoning (IKR3) Lab. He is involved in nu-
merous research initiatives that involve accessing and retrieving infor-
mation, especially genuine information. He has been Co-chair of several
Special Tracks and Workshops at International Conferences, General Co-
chair of MDAI 2019, and Co-organizer of the First Edition of the ROMCIR
Workshop. He is Associate Editor of Social Network Analysis and Mining
(SNAM), Springer-Verlag, and Editorial Board Member of Online Social Networks and Media (OSNEM),
Elsevier. His main research activities include Social Computing, Information Retrieval, Natural Lan-
guage Processing, Text Mining, and User Modeling. On these topics, he has published more than
80 research works in International Journals, at International Conferences, as Monographs, and Book
Chapters. Web site: https://ikr3.disco.unimib.it/people/marco-viviani/
6.2. Publicity and Publication Chair
Rishabh Upadhyay, PhD Student. University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Informatics, Sys-
tems, and Communication (DISCo), Milan, Italy.
Web site: https://ikr3.disco.unimib.it/people/rishabh-upadhyay/
6.3. Program Committee
• Rino Falcone, Inst. of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) – CNR, Rome, Italy
• Carlos A. Iglesias, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• Petr Knoth, The Open University, London, UK
• Udo Kruschwitz, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
• Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Doha, Qatar
• Symeon Papadopoulos, Inf. Tech. Inst. (ITI), Thessaloniki, Greece
• Marinella Petrocchi, Inst. of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) – CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Francesco Pierri, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
• Adrian Popescu, CEA LIST, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
• Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain
• Fabio Saracco, Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi (CREF), Florence, Italy
• Marco Viviani, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
• Xinyi Zhou, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
• Arkaitz Zubiaga, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the authors of the submitted articles for their interest in the considered prob-
lem, the Keynote Speaker for the interest aroused in new research directions, and the members of the
Program Committee for their valuable contribution to the success of the ROMCIR 2022 Workshop.
More information about the 2022 Edition of the ROMCIR Workshop can be found at the following
URL: https://romcir2022.disco.unimib.it/
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