Research

I'm a PhD Student in the NLP group, Department 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

  • Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims at Scale - arXiv Preprint
    F. Heppell, M. E. Bakir, K. Bontcheva
    Paper

2023

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