
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
- Luttrell, R., Xiao, L., Glass, J. (Eds.). (2021). American Democracy: Influence, Activism, and Misinformation in the Social Era, Routledge
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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)
- 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
- 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
- Xiao, L., & Chen, S. (2020, July). Misinformation in the Chinese Weibo. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Springer, Cham. 407-418.
- 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
- 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
- Li, J. F., Xiao, L. (2020). Tree Representations in Transition System for RST Parsing, the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
- 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)
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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) (7th – 11th 2021, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic), to appear
- Xiao, Y. M., Xiao, L. (2020). Effects of Anonymity on Comment Persuasiveness in Wikipedia Article for Deletion Discussions, 4th Workshop on NLP+CSS, the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 104-115
- Li, J. F., Xiao, L. (2020). syrapropa at SemEval-2020 Task 11: BERT-based Models Design for Propagandistic Technique and Span Detection, the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10163
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
Recorded Conferences
Emotions in Online Debates
Attracting Attention in Online Health Forums
Chatbot in Spiritual Activities