Professor Kalina Bontcheva
School of Computer Science
Professor of Text Analytics
Member of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research group
Full contact details
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (CS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
-
Kalina Bontcheva is a professor of natural language processing (NLP) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, co-affiliated with Sheffield’s Center for Freedom of the Media. Her research lies at the intersection of NLP, computational social media analysis, and web science, with applications to digital humanities, social science, digital journalism, business intelligence, and data science.
Between 2014 and 2016 Kalina conceived and led the PHEME international project, which was amongst the first EU projects to study computational methods for the detection and tracking of disinformation in social media. She is currently the scientific director of the veraAI project, and previously the WeVerify, SoBigData++ and SoBigData international projects. Since 2015 Kalina has also been working on real-time social media analysis around United Kingdom general elections and the Brexit referendum, and on monitoring and analysis of online abuse towards UK politicians. She co-authored the ITU/UNESCO study "Balancing Act: Countering Digital Disinformation While Respecting Freedom of Expression", two UNESCO policy briefs on Combating the COVID-19 Disinfodemic, and the UNESCO study "The Chilling: Global trends in online violence against women journalists".
Kalina’s research on online disinformation and abuse of target public figures (especially MPs and female journalists) has been covered by many UK media organisations (incl. the BBC, ITV, the Guardian and Buzzfeed UK) with reach exceeding 17.7 million. This includes real-time analysis of political engagement on social media for the 2015 UK general elections and the UK EU membership referendum; analysing Twitter abuse towards politicians in the 2017 UK general election campaign; commentary on the role of Russian bots and sock-puppet accounts in the UK EU membership referendum campaign; and online abuse towards UK MPs (2019 election), which was featured on the news and in this accompanying BBC article.
Since 2006 Kalina has been awarded 17 grants as a PI (seven of these as a sole investigator), with a total award value for her team exceeding £8.8 million, from diverse funding sources: EU funding (Frameworks 6 and 7, Horizon 2020, and Horizon Europe), UK EPSRC and ESRC funding councils, a Google Faculty Award, a Google Digital News Grant, a UK Department of Health and Social Care grant, and two active grants from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
- Research interests
-
Social media, misinformation, and abuse analysis – AI-generated misinformation detection; machine learning methods for misinformation and disinformation detection, online abuse analysis, and hate speech detection; large-scale, real-time analysis of social media content; longitudinal research on online abuse.
- Publications
-
There has been a problem showing this information. Please try again later.
- Grants
-
- AI-based models for spacio-temporal analysis of online disinformation, EPSRC, 04/2026 - 03/2027, £54,373, as Co-I
- Longitudinal, Multilingual, and Multi-format Investigation and Detection of LLM-Generated Disinformation, EPSRC, 12/2025 - 11/2028, £552,355, as PI
- Developing a Developmentally Appropriate AI Chatbot to Support Young People with Inflammatory Bowel Disease Transitioning to Adult Healthcare, NIHR, 10/2025 - 09/2028, £69,999, as PI
- Atrium: Advancing FronTier Research In the Arts and hUManities, Horizon Europe, 01/2024 - 12/2027, £370,950, as Co-I
- VIGILANT: Equipping Police Authorities with an Ecosystem of Advanced Research Tools to Identify and Investigate Disinformation, Horizon Europe, 11/2022 - 10/2025, £555,747, as Co-I
- SoBigData RI PPP, Horizon Europe, 10/2022 - 09/2025, £69,969, as PI
- vera.ai (Verification assisted by AI), Horizon Europe, 09/2022 - 11/2025, £901,250, as PI
- UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and their Applications, EPSRC, 04/2019 to 09/2027, £5,508,850, as Co-I
- Ireland Hub, EC, 09/2021 - 03/2024, £211,990, as PI
- SAI: Social Explainable Artificial Intelligence, EPSRC, 02/2021 - 01/2024, £366,348, as Co-I
- Responsible AI for Inclusive, Democratic Societies: A cross-disciplinary approach to detecting and countering abusive language online, ESRC, 02/2020 - 01/2024, £508,135, as PI
- SoBigData ++: An Integrated Infrastructures for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics, EC H2020, 01/2020 - 12/2024, £720,926, as PI
- RISIS2: European Research Infrastructure for Science, technology and Innovation policy Studies 2, EC H2020, 01/2019 - 12/2023, £476,741, as Co-I
- XAIvsDisinfo: eXplainable AI Methods for Categorisation and Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine Disinformation and Online Debates, UKRI, 06/2021 - 03/2023, £288,337, as PI
- ELE, EC H2020, 01/2021 - 06/2022, £14,140, as PI
- Studying the spread and impact of COVID-19 anti-vaccine disinformation in the UK, Research England, 12/2020 - 03/2021, £41,164, as PI
- Online Abuse towards Public Figures, Government Officials, and Scientists During the COVID-19 Crisis, Research England, 07/2020 - 03/2021, £55,479, as PI
- ELG: European Language Grid, EC H2020, 01/2019 - 06/2022, £656,631, as PI
- WeVerify: Wider and Enhanced VERIFication for You, EC H2020, 12/2018 - 11/2021, £403,577, as PI
- Journalist-in-the-Loop Machine Learning as a Service for Rumour Analysis, Industrial, 11/2018 - 12/2019, £44,642, as PI
- Automatic Detection of Online Misinformation, Industrial, 03/2018 - 12/2020, £43,077, as PI
- SoBigData Research Infrastructure, EC H2020, 09/2015 - 08/2019, £649,690, as Co-I
- ChatBot: The development of a CHATBOT to support successful transition to adult care of young people with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus, NIHR, 12/2020 - 05/2023, £18,622, as Co-I
- COMRADES: Collective Platform for Community Resilience and Social Innovation during Crises, EC H2020, 01/2016 - 12/2018, £257,000, as PI
- OpenMinTed: Open Mining INfrastructure for TExt and Data, EC H2020, 06/2015 - 05/2018, £418,388, as Co-I
- Individual Profiling through Text Analysis, Air Force Office of Scientific Research USA, 09/2014 - 09/2015, £10,746, as Co-I
- PHEME: Computing Veracity Across Media, Languages, and Social Networks, EC FP7, 10/2013 - 12/2016, £489,421, as PI
- DecarboNET: A Decarbonisation Platform for Citizen Empowerment and Translating Collective Awareness into Behavioural Change, EC FP7, 10/2013 - 09/2016, £253,753, as PI
- uComp: Embedded Human Computation for Knowledge Extraction and Evaluation, EPSRC, 11/2012 - 05/2016, £375,621, as Co-I
- AnnoMarket: Annotation Resource Marketplace in the Cloud, EC FP7, 06/2012 - 05/2014, £394,226, as Co-I
- Linked Data for Environmental Science, Joint Information Systems Committee, 06/2012 - 01/2013, £40,234, as PI
- TrendMiner: Large-scale, Cross-lingual Trend Mining and Summarisation of Real-time Media Streams, EC FP7, 11/2011 - 10/2014, £400,991, as PI
- GATE Cloud Exploratory: Adapting the General Architecture for Text Engineering to Cloud Computing, EPSRC, 02/2011 - 10/2011, £71,677, as Co-I
- Machine Learning Methods for Personalised, Abstractive Summarisation of Consumer-Generated Media, EPSRC, 10/2010 - 05/2018, £591,755, as PI
- ServiceFinder: Realizing Web Service Discovery at Web Scale, EC FP7, 01/2008 - 12/2009, £206,407, as PI
- MUSING: MUlti-Industry, Semantic-based Next Generation Business INtelliGence, EC FP6, 04/2006 - 04/2010, £776,082, as PI
- TAO: Transitioning Applications to Ontologies, EC FP6, 03/2006 - 02/2009, £581,515, as PI
- Professional activities and memberships
-
Member of the Natural Language Processing research group