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Cedric Waterschoot

Ph.D. Candidate
KNAW Meertens Instituut, Utrecht University
cedric.waterschoot (at) meertens.knaw.nl


About Me

I am a PhD candidate at KNAW Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam and Utrecht University. My research focuses on online discussions, online content moderation by news outlets and the impact that different actors have on online discussions.

I am currently writing my dissertation on hybrid content moderation of discussions hosted by online news outlets (comment sections). I create computational tools to support the content moderator in their tasks. Specifically, I look at identifying ‘good’ or ‘constructive’ comments, which news outlets manually highlight to promote better discussions. You can read about my research here (Dutch). Furthermore, I study how content moderators are currently working alongside AI-based tools as well as the opportunities for future collaboration. My PhD project is part of the larger Better-MODS project.

Alongside the work for my dissertation, I look at how you can (computationally) identify large-scale trends in online discussions and measure impact/agency of user interaction on news platforms.

Current Projects

Better-MODS: Better Informing Citizens About Current Debates

The BETTER-MODS project is a collaboration between Tilburg University, the KNAW Meertens Institute and NU.nl. This project aims to make online discussions more accessible and to understand how human moderators work alongside AI in the context of hybrid content moderation. Furthermore, we study if people engage in discussions on news articles and the motivation behind their participation.

Wie is de trol?

‘Wie is de trol?’ is a game for school student and libraries to learn about online discussions, content moderation and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is an initiative by researchers from KNAW Meertens Instituut, Tilburg University, together with NEMO Kennislink. Visit the website for a full project description.

The game is being developed by Basten Stokhuyzen, Mathilde Jansen and Cedric Waterschoot. This project is financed by a Dutch Research Agenda ‘Science Communication’ grant (NWO).

Recent work

  1. A Time-Robust Group Recommender for Featured Comments on News Platforms
    Cedric Waterschoot, Antal van den Bosch
    Frontiers in Big Data
    PDF Code

  2. AI tilt discussie naar hoger niveau
    NEMO Kennislink, Mathilde Jansen
    PDF Interview

  3. Agency and dynamics in large datasets: Dutch Islam discourse on social media
    Cedric Waterschoot
    Religion in Motion – Between Borders and Belonging (NGG 2023)
    Presentation

  4. Hybrid moderation in the newsroom: Recommending featured posts to content moderators
    Cedric Waterschoot, Antal van den Bosch
    PDF Preprint

  5. Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate
    Cedric Waterschoot, Antal van den Bosch, Ernst van den Hemel
    29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022)
    PDF Code

  6. Constructive Behavior? No Idea, but we recognize it when we see it
    Cedric Waterschoot, Ernst van den Hemel
    Digital Society Conference 2022
    Presentation

  7. Calculating Argument Diversity in Online Discussion Threads
    Cedric Waterschoot, Antal van den Bosch, Ernst van den Hemel
    3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK2021)
    PDF Code


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