Dr Diana Maynard

Dr. Diana Maynard is a Senior Research Fellow in the Dept of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, where she has been working on the development and application of multilingual text analysis tools since January 2000. She has a PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP), publishes extensively, and has more than 35 years of experience in the field. Her research involves multi-disciplinary approaches to text and social media analysis, particularly concerning issues around the safety of journalists, online hate speech, and misinformation. She is currently working on the development of tools for analysis of online abuse and its escalation to offline abuse and other harms, in particular concerning abuse towards women journalists and other public figures, where she leads the development of a toolkit and dashboard for analysis, monitoring and prediction of risk. She has also been leading work since 2018 on the development of methods and tools for studying and monitoring violations against journalists in relation to UN SDG16.10.1 in conjunction with Free Press Unlimited and UNESCO.

She is co-author of the UNESCO report The Chilling: A Global Study On Online Violence Against Women Journalists and the Broadband Commission Report The Balancing ActL Countering Digital Disinformation While Respecting Freedom of Expression, as well as a series of 7 big data case studies investigating online abuse against women journalists for which she led the technical research and analysis.

She is particularly interested in the intersection of language, communication and behaviour, looking at how people and organisations communicate about and respond to news and events, in both traditional and modern forms, and recently led a joint project with Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, on the development of socially responsible AI tools for digital democracies.

Posetti J & Shabbir N (2022) The Chilling: A global study of online violence against women journalists. ICFJ.
Maynard D, Bontcheva K & Augenstein I (2017) Natural Language Processing for the Semantic Web. Springer International Publishing.
Maynard D, Bontcheva K & Augenstein I (2016) Natural Language Processing for the Semantic Web. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
Cunningham H, Maynard D, Bontcheva K, Tablan V, Aswani N, Roberts I, Gorrell G, Funk A, Roberts A & Damljanovic D (2011) Text Processing with Gate (Version 6). GATE.
Bernstein A, Karger DR, Maynard D, Feigenbaum L, Heath T & Motta E (2010) Preface.
Bernstein A, Karger DR, Maynard D, Feigenbaum L, Heath T & Motta E (2009) Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface.
Bernstein A, Karger DR, Maynard D, Feigenbaum L, Heath T & Motta E (2009) Preface.
Sheth A, Staab S, Maynard D, Dean M, Paolucci M & Finin T (2008) Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface.

For a full list of publications, click here.

Jiang Y, Yu X, Wang Y, Xu X, Song X & Maynard D (2023) Similarity-Aware Multimodal Prompt Learning for fake news detection. Information Sciences, 647, 119446-119446.
van Erp M, Reynolds C, Maynard D, Starke A, Ibáñez Martín R, Andres F, Leite MCA, Alvarez de Toledo D, Schmidt Rivera X, Trattner C , Brewer S et al (2021) Using natural language processing and artificial intelligence to explore the nutrition and sustainability of recipes and food. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3.
Song X, Petrak J, Jiang Y, Singh I, Maynard D & Bontcheva K (2021) Classification aware neural topic model for COVID-19 disinformation categorisation. PLoS ONE, 16(2).
Maynard D, Lepori B, Petrak J, Song X & Laredo P (2020) Using ontologies to map between research data and policymakers’ presumptions: the experience of the KNOWMAK project. Scientometrics.
Harrison J, Maynard D & Torsner S (2020) Strengthening the Monitoring of Violations against Journalists through an Events-Based Methodology. Media and Communication, 8(1), 89-100.
Resce G & Maynard D (2018) What matters most to people around the world? Retrieving Better Life Index priorities on Twitter. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Fernandez M, Piccolo L, Maynard DG, Wippoo M, Meili C & Alani C (2017) Pro-Environmental Campaigns via Social Media: Analysing Awareness and Behaviour Patterns.. Journal of Web Science, 3(1), 1-15.
Maynard DG, Roberts I, Greenwood MA, Rout D & Bontcheva K (2017) A framework for real-time semantic social media analysis. Journal of Web Semantics, 44, 75-88.
Augenstein I, Maynard D & Ciravegna F (2016) Distantly supervised Web relation extraction for knowledge base population. Semantic Web, 7(4), 335-349.

Maynard D, Wright J, Greenwood MA & Bontcheva K (2023) Language Report English, European Language Equality (pp. 127-130). Springer International Publishing
Blomqvist E, Maynard D & Gangemi A (2017) Preface (pp. V-VII).
Maynard DG (2014) Challenges in Analysing Social Media. In Dusa A, Nelle D, Stock G & Wagner G (Ed.), Facing the Future: European Research Infrastructures for the Humanities and Social Sciences Berlin: SCIVERO Verlag.
Maynard D & Bontcheva K (2014) Natural language processing, Perspectives on Ontology Learning (pp. 51-67).
Maynard DG, Risse T, Senellart P & peters W (2013) Documenting Contemporary Society by Preserving Relevant Information from Twitter In Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, Mahrt M & Puschmann C (Ed.), Twitter and Society USA: Peter Lang.