Walid Magdy
Professor
Leads the SMASH group, applying social NLP to computational social science problems such as polarisation, political bias and online behaviour.
Walid Magdy's lab at Edinburgh works on language & society, interpretability, evaluation & safety of LMs and computational social science. 30 papers since 2023, 14 at top venues, mostly ACL and CSCW. 15 PhD students. 20 alumni.
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 8/ year
- at T1 venues
- 47%
- PhD students
- 15
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 20
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 14 papers2026 · T1 4 · collecting
- 6 papers2025 · T1 4
- 4 papers2024 · T1 3
- 6 papers2023 · T1 3
T1 venuesOtherVenues: ACL, CSCW, CHI, EMNLP, EACL
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Computational social science5 papers
- social5 papers
- Language & society4 papers
- Interpretability, evaluation & safety of LMs2 papers
- political1 paper
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202614 papers
- CHI (T1)"God says we are right!": The Interplay between Religion and Propaganda on Arabic Social Media
- SilkRoadNLPBenchmarking Offensive Language Detection in Persian and Pashto
- JQD: Digital MediaBeyond the Game: Comparing Political News Coverage and Twitter Discussions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup
- ICWSMFabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media
- IP&MFarsi Natural Language Processing: A Survey
- PoliticalNLPFrom Cairo to Cape Town: How African Twitter Shapes the Global Palestine-Israel Narrative
- ArabicNLPIslamicEval 2026: The Second Shared Task of Capturing LLMs Hallucination in Islamic Content
- EMNLP (T1)ParsHate: A Benchmark Dataset for Hate and Target Detection in Persian
- CHI (T1)Silencing & Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalations
- NakbaNLPThe NakbaEcho Dataset: From Oral Testimonies to a Transcribed Arabic History Corpus
- ArabicNLPTowards Speech ALDi: Predicting the Level of Dialectness from Arabic Speech
- ArabicNLPUsing LALMs for Pronunciation Error Detection in Arabic
20256 papers
- CSCW (T1)"The Prophet said so!": On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media
- ACL (T1)Culture Matters in Toxic Language Detection in Persian
- ArabicNLPIslamicEval 2025: The first shared task of capturing LLMs hallucination in Islamic content
- NLPSILexpansion: Evaluating Dictionary Based Lexicon Expansion for Social Media Analysis
- ACL (T1)Revisiting Common Assumptions about Arabic Dialects in NLP
- CHI (T1)Who should set the Standards? Analysing Censored Arabic Content on Facebook during the Palestine-Israel Conflict
20244 papers
- CSCW (T1)"Pinocchio had a Nose, You have a Network!": On Characterizing Fake News Spreaders on Arabic Social Media
- ACL (T1)Estimating the Level of Dialectness Predicts Inter-annotator Agreement in Multi-dialect Arabic Datasets
- ArabicNLPNADI 2024: The Fifth Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task
- CSCW (T1)TwiXplorer: An Interactive Tool for Narrative Detection and Analysis in Historic Twitter Data
20236 papers
- EMNLP (T1)ALDi: Quantifying the Arabic Level of Dialectness of Text
- ArabicNLPArabic Dialect Identification under Scrutiny: Limitations of Single-label Classification
- ACL (T1)DLAMA: A Framework for Curating Culturally Diverse Facts for Probing the Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models
- ASONAMEmoji are Effective Predictors of User's Demographics
- CSCW (T1)Twitter has a Binary Privacy Setting, are Users Aware of How It Works?
- CS4OAWhat Makes Good Counterspeech? A Comparison of Generation Approaches and Evaluation Metrics
Where alumni went20 listed
Apply to EdinburghFall 2027
Not announced yet
Informatics PhD
- Round
- Rolling (funding consideration)
- Opens
- —
- GRE
- See program page
- English
- See program page
- Fee
- none
Not yet confirmed for this intake.
Similar labsnearest by research summary
- GBUCL
Vasileios Lampos
- Language & society
- USUT Austin
Matthew Lease
- Knowledge, QA & retrieval
- USUC Berkeley
Gopala Anumanchipalli
- Speech recognition & spoken language
- USUMD
Julia Mendelsohn
- Language & society
- USMichigan
V.G. Vinod Vydiswaran
- Language & society
- USMIT
Omar Khattab
- Reasoning & agents
Your notes
Save this lab to keep notes.
Data
Some numbers could not be verified:
- This site is shared with other labs, so counts may overlap.
- Collected
- Verified
- Papers
- The lab homepage
- Members
- Lab homepage
- Alumni
- Lab homepage
This lab shares a website with other labs. Member and alumni counts may include them.
Tiers are venue classifications, not lab rankings.