Research Group

I am the founder and director of the Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) group at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Interests

• Computational Social Science

  Social content analysis, political bias detection, polarisation, and users' behavior analysis/prediction, with more focus on understudied communities.

• Natural Language Processing

  Social NLP (sentiment, sarcasm, hate-speech detection) with special focus on underserved languages (e.g. Arabic and its dialects and Persian).

Research Activities

• Editor for journal: Springer Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM).

• Co-organizer of the following conferences:
  - SAC Chair for Computational Social Science track at ACL 2023.
  - PC Chair for ArabicNLP 2023.
  - VC Chair for ICWSM 2022.
  - PC Chair for ASONAM 2022.

• Co-organizer of the following shared tasks:
  - ArabicNLP-2025 Task 9: IslamicEval - Capturing LLMs Hallucination in Islamic Content.
  - SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic.
  - SemEval-2021 Task 7: Hahackathon: Incorporating Demographic Factors into Shared Humor Tasks.
  - WANLP-2021 Shared Task 2: Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection In Arabic.
  - OSACT4-2020 Shared Task: Arabic offensive language detection.
  - SemEval-2016 Task 3: Community Question Answering.
  - SemEval-2015 Task 3: Answer Selection in Community Question Answering.
  - CLEF-IP (Patent retrieval) task 2012.

• Co-organizer the following workshops:
  - WANLP 2021: The Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, @EACL 2021
  - 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, @LREC 2020
  - WANLP 2019: The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, @ACL 2019
  - 3rd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, @LREC 2018
  - BroDyn: Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media, @ECIR 2018
  - 2nd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, @LREC 2016

• Tutorials and Summer Schools:
  - Summer School in Computational Social Science (SICSS-Edinburgh), 2025 School Link
  - Summer School in Computational Social Science (SICSS-Edinburgh), 2023 School Link
  - Summer School in Computational Social Science (SICSS-Edinburgh), 2022 School Link
  - Detection and Characterization of Stance on Social Media, ICWSM, Jun 2020. Tutorial Link
  - Possible Directions for Building a Career in Data Science, Alexandria University, Egypt, Dec 2018. Tutorial Link
  - Possible Directions for Building a Career in Data Science, Cairo University, Egypt, Dec 2017. Tutorial Link

Publications

Over 150 peer-reviewed published papers. Check my full list of publications here

Patents

Nine patents filed under my name while working for IBM, Microsoft, DCU, and QCRI. Check my list of patents here

Media Attentions

The list of news artciles published on some of my work could be found here

Contact

Email: (wmagdy) at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk

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Last Modified: Jul 2025

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