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Talks

Stereotypes toward Immigrants: Topics, Implicitness and Context

Where: Sala conferenze (3th floor)
When: 07/12/2023 11:30

Wolfgang S. Schmeisser-Nieto is a PhD student in Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies and a member of the Centre de Llenguatge i Computació (CLiC).at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He also participates in the European project “STERHEOTYPES: STudying European Racial Hoaxes and sterEOTYPES”. His thesis, directed by Dr Mariona Taulé and Dr Simona Frenda, focuses on the automatic detection of stereotypes toward immigrants spread through social media. Among other activities, he has co-organized the shared evaluation task DETESTS at IberLEF 2022, held at the conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN). 

Abstract:  
Stereotypes are the result of human cognition that allows us to classify others into social groups in accordance with supposed shared attributes. While it allows us to organize our reality, it also leads us to wrongly attribute characteristics to certain people that we perceive as belonging to some social category, causing prejudice and discrimination against them. One of the ways in which stereotypes are manifested is through language, therefore, the increasing presence of social media has facilitated the spread and reinforcement of these stereotypes, especially when they work in favor of political and social interests. My research aims at getting a better understanding of the phenomenon of stereotypes toward immigrants through the analysis of language. From psychological, linguistic and computational approaches, I explore proposed and new taxonomies on stereotypes and the linguistic characteristics found in the texts that make difficult the agreement among annotators, and also its automatic detection by models, with a special emphasis on the implicit expressions of stereotypes and the role of context.