Research

I'm a PhD Student and Research Associate in the NLP group, School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, supervised by Prof. Kalina Bontcheva and Dr. Carolina Scarton. I am part of the GATE team, and a contributor to the VIGILANT project.

My research primarily focuses on detecting information laundering - when disinformation is removed from its original dubious context to appear more legitimate and surface into the mainstream.

I also work on other related topics including social media misinformation analysis, propaganda detection, and corpus analysis techniques.

Publications

2024

  • Multilinguality in the VIGILANT project
    B. Spillane, C. Scarton, R. Moro, P. Ivanov, A. Targarev, J. Simko, I. A. Farha, G. Munnelly, F. Uhlárik, F. Heppell
    Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)
    Paper Semantic Scholar
  • Comparison between parameter-efficient techniques and full fine-tuning: A case study on multilingual news article classification
    O. Razuvayevskaya, B. Wu, J. A. Leite, F. Heppell, I. Srba, C. Scarton, K. Bontcheva, X. Song
    PLOS ONE
    Paper Semantic Scholar
  • Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims at Scale
    F. Heppell, M. E. Bakir, K. Bontcheva
    arXiv Preprint
    Paper Semantic Scholar

2023

  • Analysing State-Backed Propaganda Websites: a New Dataset and Linguistic Study
    F. Heppell, K. Bontcheva, C. Scarton
    Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
    Paper Code Dataset Semantic Scholar
  • SheffieldVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Mono and multilingual approaches for news genre, topic and persuasion technique classification
    B. Wu, O. Razuvayevskaya, F. Heppell, J. Leite, C. Scarton, K. Bontcheva, X. Song
    Proceedings of the The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)
    Paper Semantic Scholar
  • A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Accurate COVID-19 Information versus Misinformation
    Y. Mu, Y. Jiang, F. Heppell, I. Singh, C. Scarton, K. Bontcheva, X. Song
    TrueHealth 2023 Workshop, 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
    Paper Semantic Scholar

Teaching

  • COM6513 Natural Language Processing (Postgrad Taught) Spring 2024 - Teaching Assistant, Marking
  • COM6115 Text Processing (Postgrad Taught), Autumn 2023 - Teaching Assistant, Marking
  • COM3110 Text Processing (Undergrad), Autumn 2023 - Marking

Awards, Funding & Recognition

  • Best System Paper nominee at SemEval-2023
  • PhD funded by the University of Sheffield Faculty of Engineering Prize Scholarship
  • Received the Douglas Lewin Memorial Prize for final year (undergraduate) exam performance