Lu Xiao

Overview

I am an associate professor at the School of Information Studies (a.k.a., iSchool) in Syracuse University. I am very interested in how people reason online and the factors that influence the reasoning processes. Some of my research team’s recent research activities include: the development of algorithms to detect propagandistic techniques in online news content, the lab experiments about the potential of expert and AI-based interventions to help people detect propaganda when reading news online, and the content analysis to understand the use of persuasion strategies in social media content. Recently, I started to explore the use of technology in religious activities.

Before coming to Syracuse, I was an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario. I received my Ph.D. from the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. I was a visiting professor at Syracuse from Fall 2015 to Spring 2016, and at Xerox Research Center in Europe in Summer 2015.

Research

Recently funded projects

2021 – 2023 Impact of user reviews of service attributes on revenues in the sharing economy: Examining the case of Airbnb (PI: Meheli Basu, Whitman School), CUSE

2021 Persuasion in Clubhouse: An Interview Study, Syracuse University’s Support for Undergraduate Researchers (SOURCE)

2020 – 2023 Fight the Vulnerability to Online Disinformation – Awareness of the Manipulation and Careful Thinking, Katchmar-Wilhelm Professorship

Recent referred publications

Book and Book Chapter

1. Luttrell, R., Xiao, L., Glass, J. (Eds.). (2021). American Democracy: Influence, Activism, and Misinformation in the Social Era, Routledge
2. Xiao, L. (2021). Fighting Disinformation in Social Media: An Online Persuasion Perspective, in Luttrell, R., Xiao, L., Glass, J. (Eds.), American Democracy: Influence, Activism, and Misinformation in the Social Era, Routledge

Journal

3. Chen, S. J., Xiao, L., Mao, J. (2021). Persuasion Strategies of Misinformation-containing Posts in the Chinese Weibo, Information Processing & Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102665
4. Öcal, A., Xiao, L., & Park, J. (2021). Reasoning in social media: insights from Reddit “Change My View” submissions. Online Information Review, https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0330

Full Conference Papers

5. Kumar, A., & Xiao, L. (2022). Understanding Morality behind Online Reasoning, Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Jan. 4 – 7, Hyatt Regency Maui, Hawaii, USA), to appear
6. Asante-Agyei, C., Xiao, Y. M., & Xiao, L. (2022). Will You Talk about God with a Spirituality Chatbot? An Interview Study, Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Jan. 4 – 7, Hyatt Regency Maui, Hawaii, USA), to appear
7. Flynn, O. A., Murugadass, A., Xiao, L. (2021). Attracting Attention in Online Health Forums: Studies of r/Alzheimers and r/dementia, In Proceedings of iConference (Mar. 17- 31, virtual)
8. Li, J. F., & Xiao, L. (2020). Emotions in Online Debates: Tales from 4Forums and ConvinceMe, Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Meeting of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) (Oct. 22 – Nov. 1, virtual conference), 57(1), e255
9. Mensah, H. A., Xiao, L., Soundarajan, S. (2020). Characterizing the Evolution of Communities on Reddit, In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society (July 22, Chicago, USA), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 58 – 64
10. Xiao, L., & Chen, S. (2020, July). Misinformation in the Chinese Weibo. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer, Cham. 407-418.
11. Zhang, B., & Xiao, L. (2020, July). Augmented Tension Detection in Communication: Insights from Prosodic and Content Features. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer, Cham. 290-301.

Short Conference Papers/Posters

12. Chen, S. J., Xiao, L., Mao, J. (2021). Persuasion Strategies in Misinformation-containing Weibo Posts, In Proceedings of iConference (Mar. 17- 31, virtual), Best Poster Award
13. Li, J. F., Xiao, L. (2020). Tree Representations in Transition System for RST Parsing, the 28^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
14. Xiao, L., Asante-Agyei, C. O. (2020). Preparing for the Future of Work: Building an Informal Learning Community about Intelligent Technologies in Poor Neighborhoods, Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Meeting of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) (Oct. 22 – Nov. 1, virtual conference)
15. Xiao, L., Liu, J. Y., Zhai, W. C., & Jiang, L. Q. (2020), Computational analysis of emotions and topics in survivor interviews about Nanking massacre, In Digital Humanities 2020 (July 22 – 24, Ottawa, Canada), to appear
16. Islam, J., Xiao, L., Mercer, R. E. (2020). A Lexicon-Based Approach for Detecting Hedges in Informal Text, In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)(May 11 – 15, Marseille, France), 3109-3113
17. Xiao, Y. M., Slaton, Z. Y., & Xiao, L. (2020). TV-AfD: An Imperative-Annotated Corpus from The Big Bang Theory and Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion Discussions, In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)(May 11 – 15, Marseille, France), 6542-6548

Workshop Papers

18. Li, J. F., & Xiao, L. (2021). Neural-based RST Parsing And Analysis In Persuasive Discourse, The 7th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT) at The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (7^th – 11^th 2021, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic), to appear
19. Xiao, Y. M., Xiao, L. (2020). Effects of Anonymity on Comment Persuasiveness in Wikipedia Article for Deletion Discussions, 4^th Workshop on NLP+CSS, the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 104-115
20. Li, J. F., Xiao, L. (2020). syrapropa at SemEval-2020 Task 11: BERT-based Models Design for Propagandistic Technique and Span Detection, the 28^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10163

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Teaching

Consistent with constructivist and connectivist learning theories, my teaching method seeks to: promote intentional learning, offer authentic learning, encourage collaborative learning, nurture reflective thinking, and provide a mutual learning environment. These five principles provide a framework for my teaching guiding my curriculum design. A good educator is a reflective practitioner. To me, one of the most rewarding aspects of an academic position is the opportunity to teach and interact with students.

Courses Taught

• IST 341 Human-Centered Design
• IST 654 Information Systems Analysis
• IST 664 Natural Language Processing
• IST 776 Research Methods in Information Science and Technology