Marinella Petrocchi

Marinella Petrocchi
Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute for Informatics and Telematics IIT

PhD

About

183
Publications
46,518
Reads
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3,238
Citations
Additional affiliations
October 2000 - present
Italian National Research Council
Position
  • Researcher
October 2000 - present
IIT-CNR
Position
  • Researcher at CNR Istituto di Informatica e Telematica
Education
January 1993 - October 1999
University of Pisa
Field of study
  • Telecommunication engineering

Publications

Publications (183)
Preprint
Full-text available
Existing methods for assessing the trustworthiness of news publishers face high costs and scalability issues. The tool presented in this paper supports the efforts of specialized organizations by providing a solution that, starting from an online discussion, provides (i) trustworthiness ratings for previously unclassified news publishers and (ii) a...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this study, we investigate the use of a large language model to assist in the evaluation of the reliability of the vast number of existing online news publishers, addressing the impracticality of relying solely on human expert annotators for this task. In the context of the Italian news media market, we first task the model with evaluating exper...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly, making them increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine users. Recently, new groups of bots have emerg...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social media platforms face an ongoing challenge in combating the proliferation of social bots, automated accounts that are also known to distort public opinion and support the spread of disinformation. Over the years, social bots have evolved greatly, often becoming indistinguishable from real users, and more recently, families of bots have been i...
Article
The 4th Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2024) was part of the Satellite Events of the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024). ROMCIR served as a platform for discussions on accessing accurate information and addressing the issue of information disorder prevalent in the...
Article
Echo chambers, i.e. clusters of users exposed to news and opinions in line with their previous beliefs, were observed in many online debates on social platforms. We propose a completely unbiased entropy-based method for detecting echo chambers. The method is completely agnostic to the nature of the data. In the Italian Twitter debate about the Covi...
Article
Full-text available
For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state’s presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual margin of victory. Therefore, election campaigns are especially intense in states where there is no clear direc...
Chapter
In the realm of the Social Web, we are continuously surrounded by information pollution, posing significant threats to both individuals and society as a whole. Instances of false news, for instance, wield the power to sway public opinion on matters of politics and finance. Deceptive reviews can either bolster or tarnish the reputation of businesses...
Preprint
The presence of echo chambers, i.e. clusters of users exposed to news or opinions in line with their previous beliefs, was observed in many online debates on social platforms. Users form an echo chamber when two different phenomena appear at the same time: 1. users interact with ones sharing similar opinions; 2. users with similar opinions refer to...
Chapter
Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable content, hyperpartisan, and propagandistic information. They are automated accounts, commonly called bots. Focu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable content, hyperpartisan, and propagandistic information. They are automated accounts, commonly called bots. Focu...
Preprint
Full-text available
The science of social bots seeks knowledge and solutions to one of the most debated forms of online misinformation. Yet, social bots research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the stage for ambiguities, unrealistic expectations, and seemingly irreconcilable findings. Overcoming such issues is instrumental t...
Preprint
Full-text available
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate and ask whether it mirrors the electoral system. The U.S. electoral system provides that, regardless of the a...
Chapter
With the advent of the Social Web, we are constantly and more than ever assaulted by different kinds of information pollution, which may lead to severe issues for both individuals and society as a whole. In this context, it becomes essential to guarantee users access to genuine information that does not distort their perception of reality. For this...
Article
The 2022 Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation through Credible Information Retrieval (ROMCIR 2022), at its Second Edition as part of the Satellite Events of the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022), was concerned with providing users with access to genuine information, to mitigate the information disorder phenomenon c...
Article
Full-text available
Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web (WWW): in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes takes part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sectors: IN, OUT and SCC. SCC is the main Strongly Conne...
Preprint
Full-text available
In today's era of information disorder, many organizations are moving to verify the veracity of news published on the web and social media. In particular, some agencies are exploring the world of online media and, through a largely manual process, ranking the credibility and transparency of news sources around the world. In this paper, we evaluate...
Chapter
The ROMCIR 2022 workshop is focused on discussing and addressing issues related to information disorder, a new term that holistically encompasses all forms of communication pollution. In particular, the aim of ROMCIR is reducing such clutter, from false content to incorrect correlations, from misinformation to disinformation, through Information Re...
Preprint
Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web: in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes take part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sectors: IN, OUT and SCC. SCC is the main Strongly Connected Co...
Article
Adversarial examples are inputs to a machine learning system that result in an incorrect output from that system. Attacks launched through this type of input can cause severe consequences: for example, in the field of image recognition, a stop signal can be misclassified as a speed limit indication. However, adversarial examples also represent the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Adversarial examples are inputs to a machine learning system that result in an incorrect output from that system. Attacks launched through this type of input can cause severe consequences: for example, in the field of image recognition, a stop signal can be misclassified as a speed limit indication.However, adversarial examples also represent the f...
Article
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created to distribute spam, sponsor public characters and, ultimately, induce a bias within the public opinion. To fig...
Research Proposal
Full-text available
The fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, brings together digital and physical technologies to create responsive and interconnected operations. Companies use AI, robotics, edge computing, and the cloud to make informed and timely decisions from the supply chain to the smart factory. Solutions designed for the Industrial Internet of Things...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on every human activity and, because of the urgency of finding the proper responses to such an unprecedented emergency, it generated a diffused societal debate. The online version of this discussion was not exempted by the presence of misinformation campaigns, but, differently from what already witnessed in other...
Article
Full-text available
Social bots are automated accounts often involved in unethical or illegal activities. Academia has shown how these accounts evolve over time, becoming increasingly smart at hiding their true nature by disguising themselves as genuine accounts. If they evade, bots hunters adapt their solutions to find them: the cat and mouse game. Inspired by advers...
Article
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific segments of the population. We have seen how false information can be spread using automated accounts, known...
Chapter
In this paper, we introduce the rationale, goals, and structure of Presente Digitale, an ambitious Italian project for the realization of an online education system on Digital Culture. Presente Digitale is dedicated to teachers and their students. Its aim is to offer paths of reflection closely linked to the digital world, which can respond to the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific segments of the population. We have seen how false information can be spread using automated accounts, known...
Article
Over the past few years, online reviews have become very important, since they can influence the purchase decision of consumers and the reputation of businesses. Therefore, the practice of writing fake reviews can have severe consequences on customers and service providers. Various approaches have been proposed for detecting opinion spam in online...
Book
This book constitutes revised and selected papers from the scientific satellite events held in conjunction with the18th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2020. The conference was held virtually during December 14-17, 2020. A total of 125 submissions were received for the satellite events. The volume includes 9 papers fr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Over the last years, online reviews became very important since they can influence the purchase decision of consumers and the reputation of businesses, therefore, the practice of writing fake reviews can have severe consequences on customers and service providers. Various approaches have been proposed for detecting opinion spam in online reviews, e...
Article
Full-text available
This article investigates the relation between festivals and their destination cities. We examine what festival attendees think about the festival experience and the host city, and how the online image of the host city is shaped through the dissemination of these opinions on Twitter. We conduct a case study and analyze the opinions about a big scal...
Preprint
Full-text available
During the Covid-19 pandemics, we also experience another dangerous pandemics based on misinformation. Narratives disconnected from fact-checking on the origin and cure of the disease intertwined with pre-existing political fights. We collect a database on Twitter posts and analyse the topology of the networks of retweeters (users broadcasting agai...
Chapter
For a decade now, Academia has been researching refined techniques to detect fake reviews. In this article, rather than proposing a new detection methodology, we propose to contain the consequences of an attack launched by a fake reviewer who attaches arbitrary scores to the review target. We demonstrate that, by simply changing the score aggregato...
Article
Full-text available
Nowadays, Social Media are a privileged channel for news spreading, information exchange, and fact checking. Unexpectedly for many users, automated accounts, known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of information diffusion. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on the...
Book
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management, STM 2020, co-located with the 25th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Guildford, UK, but had to be moved to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The workshop...
Chapter
The railway sector has been a source of inspiration for generations of researchers challenged to develop models and tools to analyze safety and reliability. Threats were coming mainly from within, due to occasionally faults in hardware components. With the advent of smart trains, the railway industry is venturing into cybersecurity and the railway...
Article
DNA-inspired online behavioral modeling techniques have been proposed and successfully applied to a broad range of tasks. In this paper, we investigate the fundamental laws that drive the occurrence of behavioral similarities among Twitter users, employing a DNA-inspired technique. Our findings are multifold. First, we demonstrate that, despite app...
Chapter
Full-text available
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users) are able to amplify the dissemination of (fake) information by orders of magnitude. Using Twitter as a benchmar...
Preprint
Full-text available
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users) are able to amplify the dissemination of (fake) information by orders of magnitude. Using Twitter as a benchmar...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The arm race between spambots and spambot-detectors is made of several cycles (or generations): a new wave of spambots is created (and new spam is spread), new spambot filters are derived and old spambots mutate (or evolve) to new species. Recently, with the diffusion of the adversarial learning approach, a new practice is emerging: to manipulate o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on a specific top...
Preprint
Full-text available
The arm race between spambots and spambot-detectors is made of several cycles (or generations): a new wave of spambots is created (and new spam is spread), new spambot filters are derived and old spambots mutate (or evolve) to new species. Recently, with the diffusion of the adversarial learning approach, a new practice is emerging: to manipulate o...
Book
Full-text available
In recent years, Cloud of Things CoT has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm that enables intelligent and self-configuring (smart) IoT devices and sensors to be connected with the cloud through the Internet. The Cloud of thing paradigm can stimulate the development of innovative and novel applications to various areas such as smart cities, smart ho...
Article
Nowadays, companies and enterprises are more and more incline to exploit the pervasive action of on-line social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Indeed, several promotional and marketing campaigns are carried out by concurrently adopting several social medial channels. These campaigns reach very quickly a wide range of different cate...
Chapter
The most popular e-commerce search engines allow the user to run a keyword search, to find relevant results and to narrow down the results by mean of filters. The engines can also keep track of data and activities of the users, to provide personalized content, thus filtering automatically out a part of the results. Issues occur when personalization...
Article
Full-text available
Since decades, genetic algorithms have been used as an effective heuristic to solve optimization problems. However, in order to be applied, genetic algorithms may require a string-based genetic encoding of information, which severely limited their applicability when dealing with online accounts. Remarkably, a behavioral modeling technique inspired...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this paper is to show the application of a set of intelligent data analysis techniques to about 7 million of online travel reviews, with the aim of automatically extracting useful information. The reviews, collected from two popular online tourism-related review platforms, are all those posted by reviewers about one specific Italian...
Chapter
In this paper, we propose and test an approach based on regression models, to predict the review score of an item, across different reviewer categories. The analysis is based on a public dataset with more than 2.5 million hotel reviews, belonging to five specific reviewers’ categories. We first compute the relation between the average scores associ...
Chapter
The ADBIS conferences provide an international forum for the presentation of research on database theory, development of advanced DBMS technologies, and their applications. The 22nd edition of ADBIS, held on September 2–5, 2018, in Budapest, Hungary, includes six thematic workshops collecting contributions from various domains representing new tren...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper considers Data Sharing Agreements and their management as a key aspect for a secure, private and controlled access and usage of data. Starting from describing formats and languages for the agreements, we then focus on the design, development, and performance evaluation of an analysis tool, to spot potential conflicts within the data priv...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We envisage a revolutionary change in the approach to spambot detection: instead of taking countermeasures only after having collected evidence of new spambot mischiefs, in a near future techniques will be able to anticipate the ever-evolving spammers.
Article
Full-text available
This paper considers online news censorship and it concentrates on censorship of identities. Obfuscating identities may occur for disparate reasons, from military to judiciary ones. In the majority of cases, this happens to protect individuals from being identified and persecuted by hostile people. However, being the collaborative web characterised...
Preprint
This paper considers online news censorship and it concentrates on censorship of identities. Obfuscating identities may occur for disparate reasons, from military to judiciary ones. In the majority of cases, this happens to protect individuals from being identified and persecuted by hostile people. However, being the collaborative web characterised...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, we analyse a dataset of hotel reviews. In details, we enrich the review dataset, by extracting additional features, consisting of information on the reviewers' profiles and the reviewed hotels. We argue that the enriched data can gain insights on the factors that most influence consumers when composing reviews (e.g., if the appreciat...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the sa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recently, DNA-inspired online behavioral modeling and analysis techniques have been proposed and successfully applied to a broad range of tasks. In this paper, we employ a DNA-inspired technique to investigate the fundamental laws that drive the occurrence of similarities among Twitter users. The achieved results are multifold. First, we demonstrat...
Preprint
In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the sa...
Conference Paper
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for aggregating online reviews, according to the opinions they express. Our methodology is unsupervised, due to the fact that it does not rely on pre-labeled reviews, and it is agnostic, since it does not make any assumption about the domain or the language of the review content. We measure the adherence o...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for aggregating online reviews, according to the opinions they express. Our methodology is unsupervised - due to the fact that it does not rely on pre-labeled reviews - and it is agnostic - since it does not make any assumption about the domain or the language of the review content. We measure the adherenc...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent studies in social media spam and automation provide anecdotal argumentation of the rise of a new generation of spambots, so-called social spambots. Here, for the first time, we extensively study this novel phenomenon on Twitter and we provide quantitative evidence that a paradigm-shift exists in spambot design. First, we measure current Twit...
Article
Full-text available
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algo...
Preprint
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While favouring communications and easing information sharing, Social Network Sites are also used to launch harmful campaigns against specific groups and individuals. Cyberbullism, incitement to self-harm practices, sexual predation are just some of the severe effects of massive online offensives. Moreover, attacks can be carried out against groups...