The pervasive spread of online misinformation and hate speech poses critical threats to societal well-being and democratic discourse. While neural language models (NLMs) show promise in generating counter-arguments and debunking fake news, they often suffer from limitations such as hallucination, knowledge scarcity, and a lack of sophisticated argumentative reasoning. This PhD project aims to overcome these shortcomings by developing novel knowledge-driven neural language generation pipelines. We will focus on integrating diverse external knowledge sources, principles from argumentation theory, and domain-specific features to enable the generation of factually accurate, persuasive, and ethically sound counterspeech. The goal is to build advanced generative AI systems that can effectively and safely mitigate the impact of both misinformation and hate speech online.

This PhD opportunity is a collaboration between Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Trento. For more information on this call and how to apply, please visit the website of the University of Trento (https://www.unitn.it/en/phd/information-engineering-and-computer-science).