Francielle Vargas

PhD in Computer Science - Natural Language Processing
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I am a computer and language scientist with a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Natural Language Processing, both earned in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics from the University of São Paulo (USP). I also hold a BS in Information Systems and a BA in Linguistics. During my Ph.D., I was a visiting researcher at the University of Southern California (USC) in the USA and an invited researcher and speaker at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) in Germany. I was honored to receive the prestigious Google Latin America Research Award (LARA). Additionally, I have actively contributed to ACL and AAAI conferences and workshops, serving as a program committee member and co-organizing ICWSM in 2021, 2022, and 2023, along with several shared tasks on hate speech. Currently, I am co-organizing the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) and Explainable Deep Neural Networks for Responsible AI (DeepXplain). My research focuses on enhancing the interpretability and fairness of Large Language Models (LLMs), with a strong emphasis on the ethical implications of AI. I have developed explainable models and datasets for complex tasks such as hate speech detection and fact-checking, utilizing post-hoc and self-explaining techniques to improve model transparency while addressing fairness and mitigating bias.

Research Interests
  • Responsible AI, Explainability and Interpretability, Bias Mitigation, Fairness
  • Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection, Toxicity, Radicalism and Morality
  • Fact-Checking, Fake News and Media Bias Detection, Misinformation, and Factuality
  • Opinion and Argument Mining, Emotion, Sentiment and Stylistic Analysis, Subjectivity
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Research Projects
Press Coverage
Publications
2025

    • Discourse Annotation Guideline for Low-Resource Languages
      Francielle Vargas, Wolfgang Schmeisser-Nieto, Zohar Rabinovich, Thiago A.S. Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      Natural Language Engineering Journal. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-44. 2024. to appear

 2024

    • Socially Responsible and Explainable Automated Fact-Checking and Hate Speech Detection
      Francielle Vargas
      Ph.D. Thesis in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics . University of São Paulo, 2024. 223 p. São Carlos, Brazil. see

    • Context-Aware and Expert Data Resources for Brazilian Portuguese Hate Speech Detection
      Francielle Vargas, Isabelle Carvalho, Thiago A.S. Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      Natural Language Engineering Journal. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-22. 2024. see

    • Improving Explainable Fact-Checking via Sentence-Level Factual Reasoning
      Francielle Vargas, Isadora Salles, Diego Alves, Ameeta Agrawal, Thiago Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      7th Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER @ EMNLP 2024). Miami, United States. see

    • HausaHate: An Expert Annotated Corpus for Hausa Hate Speech Detection
      Francielle Vargas, Samuel Guimarães, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Diego Alves, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin, Diallo Mohamed, Thiago Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH @ NAACL 2024). pp. 52–58. Mexico City, Mexico. see

    • Extended Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection During Russia-Ukraine Crisis - Shared Task at CASE 2024
      Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Farhan Jafri, Hariram Veeramani, Raghav Jain, Sandesh Jain, Francielle Vargas, Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Usman Naseem
      Workshop Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (CASE @ EACL 2024). pp. 221–228. St. Julians, Malta. see

 2023

    • Predicting Sentence-Level Factuality of News and Bias of Media Outlets
      Francielle Vargas, Kokil Jaidka, Thiago A.S. Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2023). pp. 1197–1206. Varna, Bulgaria. see

    • Socially Responsible Hate Speech Detection: Can Classifiers Reflect Social Stereotypes?
      Franciell Vargas, Isabelle Carvalho, Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Thiago A.S. Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2023). pp. 1187–1196. Varna, Bulgaria. see

    • NoHateBrazil: A Brazilian Portuguese Text Offensiveness Analysis System
      Franciell Vargas, Isabelle Carvalho, Wolfgang Schmeisser-Nieto, Fabrício Benevenuto, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2023). pp.1180–1186. Varna, Bulgaria. see

    • Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection - Shared Task 4, CASE 2023
      Surendrabikram Thapa, Farhan Jafr, Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Francielle Vargas, Roy Ka-Wei Le, Usman Naseem
      Workshop Proceedings of the 14th Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (CASE @ RANLP 2023) . pp.151-159. Varna, Bulgaria. see

 2022

    • HateBR: A Large Expert Annotated Corpus of Brazilian Instagram Comments for Offensive Language and Hate Speech Detection
      Franciell Vargas, Isabelle Carvalho, Fabiana R. Góes, Thiago A.S. Pardo, Fabrício Benevenuto
      13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022). pp. 7174–7183. Marseille, France. see

    • Rhetorical Structure Approach for Online Deception Detection: A Survey
      Francielle Vargas, Jonas D'Alessandro, Zohar Rabinovich, Fabrício Benevenuto, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022). pp. 5906‑5915. Marseille, France. see

    • Studying Dishonest Intentions in Texts
      Francielle Vargas, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      Deceptive AI. Springer: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1296. pp. 166–178. see

    • Extended Multilingual Protest News Detection - Shared Task 1, CASE 2021 and 2022
      Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Osman Mutlu, Fırat Duruşan, Onur Uca, Alaeddin Gürel, Benjamin J. Radford, Yaoyao Dai, Hansi Hettiarachchi, Niklas Stoehr, Tadashi Nomoto, Milena Slavcheva, Francielle Vargas, Aaqib Javid, Aaqib Javid, Erdem Yörük
      Workshop Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (CASE @ EMNLP 2022). pp. 223–228. Abu Dhabi, Arab Emirates. see

 2021

    • Contextual-Lexicon Approach for Abusive Language Detection
      Francielle Vargas, Fabiana R. Góes, Isabelle Carvalho, Fabrício Benevenuto, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021). pp. 1442-1451. Held Online. see

    • Toward Discourse-Aware Models for Multilingual Fake News Detection
      Francielle Vargas, Fabrício Benevenuto, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021). pp. 210-218. Held Online. see

    • Implicit Opinion Aspect Clues in Portuguese Texts: Analysis and Categorization
      Mateus T. Machado, Thiago A. S. Pardo, Evandro E. S. Ruiz, Ariani Di Felippo, Francielle Vargas
      15th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2021). pp. 68-78. Fortaleza, Brazil. see

    • Towards A Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible and Equitable AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)
      Jason R.C. Nurse, Francielle Vargas, Naeemul Hassan, Dakuo Wang, Panagiotis Andriotis, Amira Ghenai, Kokil Jaidka, Eni Mustafaraj, Kenneth Joseph and Brooke Foucault Welles
      Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021). pp. 01-12. Held Online. see

2020 and before

    • Linguistic Rules for Fine-Grained Opinion Extraction
      Francielle Vargas, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      Workshop Proceedings of the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (SocialSens @ ICWSM 2020). pp. 1-6. Held Online. see

    • Identifying Fine-Grained Opinion and Classifying Polarity on Coronavirus Pandemic
      Francielle Vargas, Rodolfo S. S. Dos Santos, Pedro R. Rocha
      9th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS 2020). pp. 511-520. Rio Grande, Brazil. see

    • Aspect Clustering Methods for Sentiment Analysis
      Francielle Vargas, Thiago A.S. Pardo
      13th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2018). pp.365-374. Canela, Brazil. see

    • The Coreference Annotation of the CSTNews Corpus
      Thiago A. S. Pardo, Jorge Baptista, Magali S. Duran, Maria das Graças Nunes, Fernando Nóbrega, Sandra Aluísio, Ariani Di Felippo, Eloize Seno, Raphael R. Silva, Rafael Anchieta, Henrico Brum, Márcio Dias, Rafael Martins, Erick Maziero, Jackson Souza, Francielle Vargas
      2nd Workshop on Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IberEval @ SEPLN 2017). pp. 102-112. Murcia, Spain. see

    • Semantic Clustering of Aspects for Opinion Mining
      Francielle Vargas
      MS.c. Thesis in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics . University of São Paulo, 2017. 126 p. São Carlos, Brazil. see
Resources
Methods (patents)
  • B+M: Contextualized Bag-of-Words with Feature Saliency for Explainable Hate Speech Detection
  • SSA: A Counterfactual Explanation Approach to Assess Social Bias in Hate Speech Classifiers
  • SELFAR: Sentence-Level Factual Reasoning for Explanable Fact-Checking
Datasets
  • HateBR and HateBRXplain: An Expert Benchmark Dataset for Brazilian Portuguese Hate Speech Detection with Human--Annotated Rationales
  • FactNews: A Benchmark Dataset for Sentence-Level Factuality and Media Bias Prediction
  • HausaHate: A Benchmark Expert Annotated Dataset for Hausa Hate Speech Detection
  • SentiAspect-PT: A Dataset of Consumer Reviews for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
  • OPCovidBR: A Dataset of Covid-19 Tweets for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
  • Deceiver: A RST-Annotated Dataset for Multilingual Fake News Detection
Softwares Lexicons
  • PRO: A Set of Taxonomies for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
  • MOL: A Context-Aware Multilingual Offensive Lexicon
Teaching
  • 2021: Neural Networks and Deep Learning . Teaching Assistant. University of São Paulo
  • 2020: Computing Theory and Compilers. Teaching Assistant. University of São Paulo
  • 2016: Computer Seminars I. Teaching Assistant. University of São Paulo
Service
Organizing Committee
Co-Organizing
Area Chairing
Program Committee
Natural Language Processing
Computational Social Science
Machine Learning
Journal Reviewer
  • Natural Language Processing Journal: Since 2025 - Current
    • Awards

    Awards, Grants and Scholarships.

    • Google Latin America Research Award (LARA 2024)
    • Diversity and Inclusion Grant (EMNLP 2024)
    • Diversity and Inclusion Grant (NAACL 2024)
    • Doctoral Research Scholarship (CAPES, 2019)
    • Master’s Research Scholarship (CAPES 2015)
    • Undergraduate Research Scholarship (CNPq, 2013)
    • Outstanding Academic Achievement Award (UFMG, 2013)
    • Outstanding Academic Achievement Award (UFMG, 2012)
    Talks