On the 1st of October 2019 I started my PhD at the Open University, a journey that is reaching an end very sooon (I am writing my thesis nows). My supervisors are Harith Alani and Alistair Willis.

In my PhD I cover different topics: corroboration and omission, persuasion (propaganda and sentiment), political leanings and topic analysis. My research goal is to study how news sources with diffferent political leaning are using propaganda in different ways.

This started in my first year with an analysis of how different articles present the same events, by using different emphasis and selecting different details. During this period, my goal was more on the comparative analysis. You can see more in the video below or take a look at the poster sent to the OU poster competition 2020. A more detailed explanation of the initial objectives can be seen in the position paper that has been presented at the Text2Story workshop.

Then in my second year I shifted my goals more towards the automatic detection of propaganda techniques, and how different news sources use them in specific ways.

And in my third year I analysed how these techniques vary across topics and how the current approaches for propaganda detection are specifically targeting extreme-right propaganda.

Now, in my fourth year of my PhD, I am writing up my thesis and I am looking forward to finish the manuscript by the end of May 2023.