[ecrea] postdoctoral fellowship open position university of lorraine

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPEN POSITION UNIVERSITY OF LORRAINE

Online Hate Speech Against Migrants

COORDINATION

Research coordinator: Crem, University of Lorraine (Pr. Angeliki Monnier)
Co-coordinator: Loria, University of Lorraine (Dr. Irina Illina MCF HDR, 
Dr. Dominique Fohr CNRS)









TERMS AND VENUE

This one-year position will be based at Crem (Metz/Nancy) and Loria 
(Nancy), France (University of Lorraine).
The target start date for the position is April 1st, 2019, with some 
flexibility on the exact start date.

SELECTION CRITERIA

PhD in Information and Communication Sciences, or Language Science. 
Research experience in social media and language data analysis.
Very good mastery of the French language.
Very good written and oral expression skills, in French and in English. 
Curiosity, open-mindedness.

Autonomy, teamwork skills.

HOW TO APPLY

Applicants are requested to submit the following materials:
• A cover letter applying for the position
• Full CV and list of publications
• Statement of Research (summary of research achievements and 
perspectives for upcoming researches)

• Academic transcripts (diplomas, courses statements, grades, etc.) 
(unofficial versions are fine) • Recommendation letters are not 
obligatory but are strongly recommended.

Deadline for application is December 10th, 2018.
Applications are only accepted through email. All documents must be sent 
to (angeliki.monnier /at/ univ-lorraine.fr) 
<mailto:(angeliki.monnier /at/ univ-lorraine.fr)>

Applicants will be interviewed by an Ad Hoc Commission on January 15th, 
2019. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT

This position is open as part of the Open Language and Knowledge project 
for Citizens (OLKi), carried out within the IMPACT/Lorraine University 
of Excellence (LUE) framework. Under the direction of

1

Pr. Angeliki Monnier (Crem), Dr. Irina Illina and Dr. Dominique Fohr 
(Loria), the post-doctoral fellow will work on online hate speech 
against migrants.

Social context

According to the 2017 International Migration Report, the number of 
migrants worldwide has increased rapidly in recent years. This 
development is causing great public concern around the world, 
particularly in Europe. The economic crisis affecting some countries of 
the Old Continent also feeds feelings of insecurity, encouraging the 
development of anti-immigrant movements. The media are often pointed out 
for their tendency to depict refugees and migrants negatively, 
consolidating fears. A recent EU project has revealed a significant 
increase in hate speech against immigrants and minorities, who are often 
accused of being the cause of current economic and social problems. 
Participatory web and social media seem to amplify the intensity and 
scope of hate speech. The fight against racism and hatred on the 
Internet is currently one of the priorities of the French government. On 
September 20th, 2018, a report commissioned on this topic was given to 
the Prime Minister, containing twenty proposals to combat hate on the 
Internet.

Scientific context and scope

The objective of this postdoctoral contract will be to study the context 
of the appearance of hateful contents (circumstances of emergence, 
locutors, dissemination processes, etc.), and to analyze the latter as 
linguistic productions (narrative approaches, speech acts, enunciation, 
etc.) in the light of the creation of a lexicon of hate speech in French.

Crem and Loria are already involved in this project. Owing to the 
technology of “neural networks” (deep learning), their collaboration 
aims to collect and shape a corpus of hateful expressions against 
migrants, but also to develop an app that could automatically detect 
hate speech in comments posted on the Internet, especially in media 
websites.

The objective of the Crem-Loria collaboration in this postdoctoral 
contract is to refine these initial results through qualitative analyses 
of online hate speech against migrants. The aim is to achieve a better 
understanding of the social phenomenon of hatred, as well as to improve 
the development of algorithms used to qualify language.

For this reason, the collaboration between Crem and Loria will take an 
iterative form, between the qualitative analysis of restricted corpora 
and the work with algorithms. It will cover both the constitution of the 
corpus (online data collection, search for expressions of hate) and the 
analysis of this corpus (creation and organization of the lexicon).

The research will focus on user-generated content (social networks, 
comments on media websites, etc.). Part of the analyzed data will come 
from the OLKi platform, which will also serve as a support for the 
evaluation of the algorithms developed.

FELLOW’S MISSIONS

  * Collect online data (hate speech against migrants), using technical
    solutions proposed by Loria.
  * Analyze these discourses using Humanities and Social Sciences (SHS)
    approaches: socio- pragmatic contexts of hateful comments,
    linguistic analysis of speeches (speech acts, narratives,
    enunciation, etc.). Depending on the candidate’s profile, image
    analysis can be
included in the research project, as an additional component.
• Contribute to the development of a lexicon in French about online 
hatred against migrants

(supervised by Crem and Loria).

2

  * Write scientific articles based on research results, in
    collaboration with the supervisors and co- signed with them, to be
    published in scientific journals and / or to be presented at
    national and / or international conferences.
  * Attend regular meetings between the two teams.
  * Provide regular reports on the project’s progress and a final report
    at the end of it.
  * The fellow is expected to regularly participate in the Crem and
    Loria seminars and other
research activities.

AFFILIATION UNITS

Crem, Center for Research on Mediations, comprises more than 230 
researchers: approximately 80 tenured scholars, more than 90 doctoral 
students, 45 associate members and 7 staff members. Its researchers 
belong to 11 disciplines: nearly 90 % come from the Information and 
Communication Sciences, Language sciences, French, Literature and Art 
Sciences; about 10 % are specialists in English and Anglo-Saxon 
languages, Arabic, Germanic and Romance languages, Anthropology, 
Psychology and Sociology.

Pixel is one of the four Crem teams, with more than 40 members, 
including 16 tenured scholars, with a specialization in the field of the 
usages of information and communication technologies. Pixel researchers 
implement different methodological approaches: surveys, content 
analyzes, socio- technical analyzes, usage observations, 
socio-historical analysis, etc. For years, Pixel has been developing a 
sustained research activity around several thematic areas: digital 
educational practices (online learning platforms, serious games), access 
to online information (search engines, information websites, social 
networks, micro-blogging, information monitoring), online collaboration 
(participatory work environments, watch and curation tools, viral 
dissemination of journalistic content) and creative industries (digital 
games, expressive games, video games).

Website: https://crem.univ-lorraine.fr/lunite/equipe-pixel/

Loria, Laboratory of Research in Computer Science and its Applications 
is a joint research unit (UMR 7503), common to several institutions: the 
CNRS, the University of Lorraine and Inria. Since its creation in 1997, 
Loria's mission is to enhance and promote fundamental and applied 
research in Computer Sciences. The scientific work is carried out in 28 
teams structured in 5 departments, 15 of which are shared with Inria, 
representing a total of more than 400 persons. Loria is one of the 
largest laboratories in Lorraine.

Multispeech is one of the 28 Loria-INRIA Grand Est teams. It comprises 
12 tenured scholars. The Multispeech research project focuses on speech 
processing, paying particular attention to multisource (source 
separation, robust speech recognition), multilingual (foreign language 
learning) and multimodal (audiovisual synthesis) aspects. Its research 
program is structured in 3 axes:

- the explicit modeling of speech, which exploits its physical dimension;
- the statistical modeling of speech, which relies on techniques of 
automatic learning such as the Bayesian models (HMM-GMM) and networks of 
deep neurons (DNN);
- the uncertainties related to the high variability of the speech signal 
and the imperfection of the models.

Website: http://team.inria.fr/multispeech/


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