Francielle Vargas      
Francielle Vargas
Francielle Vargas

I am an Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing researcher with a focus on Language Model Interpretability and Fairness. I obtained a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Natural Language Processing, both in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics, from the University of São Paulo (USP), as well as a B.Sc. in Information Systems and a B.A. 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. My work has received both national and international recognition, including the Google Latin America Research Award (LARA), the Maria Carolina Monard Award for the Best Thesis in Artificial Intelligence, and the Trevisan Prize for Students “AI for Good,” awarded by the Computer Science Department of Bocconi University and EDGE. I was also nominated by the Brazilian Computer Society for national thesis awards in Computer Science and in Computational Social Science. I actively contribute to the international AI and NLP research community, serving as a program committee member and area chair for leading venues such as ACL, AAAI, IJCNN, and ACM. I have also co-organized workshops including the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), and Explainable Deep Neural Networks for Responsible AI (DeepXplain), along with shared tasks on hate speech detection [i] [ii]. My research aims to enhance the interpretability and robustness of language models while ensuring alignment with safety, factuality, and fairness. With significant contributions to addressing hate speech and misinformation in underrepresented communities, my research advances human-centered AI by developing rigorous computational methods and benchmark datasets that promote fairness, transparency, and accountability in NLP systems.

Awards, Fellowships, and Research Grants
  • 2025: International Trevisan Prize for Students “AI for Good”
    (Bocconi University)
  • 2025: Maria Carolina Monard Best Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence
    (University of São Paulo)
  • 2025: Nominated for the Thesis Award in Computer Science
    (Brazilian Computer Society)
  • 2025: Nominated for the Thesis Award in Computational Social Science
    (Brazilian Computer Society)
  • 2025: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
    (São Paulo Research Foundation)
  • 2024: Google Latin America Research Award
    (Google Research)
  • 2024: Awarded the Association Computational Linguistics D&I Grant
    (EMNLP - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)
  • 2024: Awarded the Association Computational Linguistics D&I Grant
    (NAACL - Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL)
  • 2013: Outstanding Academic Achievement Award
    (Federal University of Minas Gerais)
  • 2012: Outstanding Academic Achievement Award
    (Federal University of Minas Gerais)
Research Projects

📰 Latest News

  • Jan 13, 2026 | Honored to be one of the winners of the International Trevisan Prize for Students “AI for Good” 2025 awarded by the Computer Science Department of Bocconi University and EDGE! This prestigious award honors the legacy of Prof. Luca Trevisan by celebrating rigorous computer science in service of social inclusion and real-world impact. Check it out!
  • Dez 4, 2025 | Very proud to present two posters at the 2025 Synthesizer Open Showcase, hosted by the Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University! Check it out!
  • Nov 23, 2025 | Very glad to be selected among the top 25% of candidates in the Brazil Conference Researchers Program 2026, promoted by MIT and Harvard, in recognition of dedication, excellence, and a strong commitment to developing innovative solutions to real-world challenges in Brazil. Check it out!
  • Nov 8, 2025 | Our paper has been accepted at AAAI 2026! We introduce SRA-Supervised Rational Attention, an extension of my Ph.D. that proposes a self-explaining framework aligning attention mechanisms with human rationales for hate speech detection.
  • Sep 24, 2025 | My Ph.D. thesis was nominated by Brazilian Computer Society for the Thesis and Dissertation Award (CTD) in Computational Social Science (Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Web). Check it out!
  • Set 20, 2025 | Excited to serve on the evaluation committee of the HACKATHON RAIA 2025! The event will provide a unique environment for the development of cutting-edge AI solutions to tackle misinformation with recognition through awards.
  • Ago 20, 2025 | Our paper has been accepted at EMNLP 2025! We introduce a multilingual benchmark dataset to evaluate how LLMs reason morally when handling hate speech, using multi-hop explanations.
  • Ago 8, 2025 | My Ph.D. thesis has been recognized as the best in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Brazil, receiving the prestigious Maria Carolina Monard Award! Check it out!
  • July 1, 2025 | Excited to supervise two students at the DeepXplain Summer School on Explainable and Trustworthy AI at the University of Oslo, where we are working on an extension of my PhD research: Supervised Rational Attention (SRA).
  • May 7, 2025 | My Ph.D. thesis was nominated by Brazilian Computer Society for the Thesis and Dissertation Award (CTD) in the broader Computer Science area. Check it out!
  • Fev 28, 2025 | Our paper "Discourse-aware annotation guideline for low-resource languages" has finally been published in the Natural Language Processing Journal (Cambridge University Press)! By explicitly modeling discourse-level phenomena, our approach not only enhances data quality but also helps to produce more interpretable machine learning models.
  • Jan 15, 2025 | Honored to be part of the Program Committee for the "Towards a safer web for women: first international workshop on protecting women online" at the web conference 2025", hosted in Sydney, Australia.
  • Dec 5, 2024 | Our IJCNN 2025 Special Session: "Explainable deep neural networks for responsible AI: post-hoc and self-explaining approaches (DeepXplain 2025)" has been accepted! This session will bring innovative discussions on making Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) more transparent and responsible.
  • Nov 29, 2024 | Our paper has been accepted at COLING 2025! In this paper, we introduce the "HateBRXplain, the first benchmark dataset for explainable hate speech detection in Portuguese".
  • Nov 12, 2024 | Our paper has been accepted at FEVER @ EMNLP 2024! We introduce the "SELFAR - Sentence-Level Factual Reasoning for Explainable Fact-Checking!"
  • Sep 06, 2024 | Our paper, "Context-aware and expert data resources for Brazilian Portuguese hate speech detection" has been published online in the Natural Language Processing Journal by Cambridge University Press!
  • Sep 05, 2024 | Honored to be selected as an organizer for the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH @ ACL 2025) alongside Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco, Agostina Calabrese, Debora Nozza, Christine de Kock and Zeerak Talat.
  • Jun 16, 2024 | Our paper has been accepted at WOAH @ NAACL 2024! We introduced the "HausaHate: The first benchmark dataset for Hate Speech Detection in Hausa!"
  • Apr 1, 2024 | I am visiting the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Southern California (USC) in LA under the supervision of Professor Morteza Dehghani. I am excited about exchanging knowledge about disinformation, hate speech, and AI explainability, as well as discussing potential future collaborations!
  • Fev 16, 2024 | Honored to be a Keynote Speaker at the TechCLAVE 2024 International Conference, organized by the PG Department of Journalism and Communication at DG Vaishnav College in Chennai, India. I will be sharing insights on fine-grained factuality and media bias prediction. I'm looking forward to engaging with global experts on the role of technology in shaping journalism and digital media.
  • Dec 4, 2023 | Honored to receive the prestigious Google Latin America Research Award (LARA) PhD Fellowship! This recognition highlights my contributions to the field and supports my ongoing research on responsible AI and social impact.
  • Nov 16, 2023 | Invited to speaker at the Conference on Harmful Online Communication at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. My talk provided insights into the methods and benchmarks we developed in Brazil to combat disinformation and hate speech.
  • Sep 8, 2023 | Three of our papers have been accepted at RANLP 2023! We presented three full papers covering fact-checking, hate speech detection, media bias, and social stereotype bias mitigation.
  • Sep 4, 2022 | Invited to be a Dataset Co-Chair for ICWSM'23, alongside Kokil Jaidka, Michael Sirivianos, and Siqi Wu!
  • Jun 20, 2022 | Two of our papers have been accepted at LREC 2022! we introdcued the "HateBR, the first benchmark dataset for hate speech detection in Brazilian Portuguese" and "A Survey on Rhetorical Structure Theory for Online Deception Detection".
  • Set 1, 2021 | Our paper has been accepted at RANLP 2021! The "Contextual-Lexicon Approach for Abusive Language Detection" introduces a contextualized Bag-of-Words (BoW) model that leverages an interpretable input representation with feature saliency to improve both interpretability and fairness in hate speech detection.
  • Jun 8, 2021 | Proud to have contributed to the first Diversity & Accessibility (D&A) initiatives for ICWSM! The report outlines concrete actions and lessons learned to help foster a more inclusive and welcoming conference. Check it out!
  • April 17, 2020 | Participated in the "Antisemitism on Social Media Datathon and Hackathon", an international project led by Professors Gunther Jikeli and Damir Cavar from NLP reserach group at Indiana University, USA. Check it out!
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