Fatima Haouari

Fatima Haouari is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Qatar University (QU). She received her BSc and MSc. degrees in Computer Science from QU. Her research interests span information retrieval, natural language processing, and social media analytics. Fatima joined bigIR research group at QU in 2019, started her PhD since then, and was awarded a GSRA research grant from QNRF to support her PhD study. Her PhD focuses on evidence-based  rumor verification in Arabic Twitter. She published her work in top conferences such as ECIR and SIGIR, and journals such as IP&M and SNAM. During her PhD journey, Fatima led the construction and annotation of multiple Twitter datasets in this area, which were released to the research community. She has co-organized CLEF CheckThat! Lab 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024 targeting multiple problems related to rumor verification and fake news. She received the Best Paper Award in WANLP 2021 workshop for her work on Arabic COVID-19 rumor verification in Twitter. 

Research Activities

• Co-organizer of the following shared tasks:

  • 2024: The CLEF-2024 CheckThat! Lab: Check-Worthiness, Subjectivity, Persuasion, Roles, Authorities and Adversarial Robustness.  

  • 2023: CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2023: Checkworthiness, Subjectivity, Political Bias, Factuality, and Authority of News Articles and Their Sources. 

  • 2021: CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2021: Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News. 

  • 2020: CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2020: Enabling Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media.

• Served as a PC co-chair in CLEF 2023 CheckThat! Lab.  

• Served as a PC member:

  • 2024: SIGIR, ECIR.

  • 2023: SIGIR, ICTIR, ArabicNLP.

  • 2022: OSACT workshop.

  • 2020: CIKM resources track.

• Served as a reviewer in several top venues:

  • 2023: CIKM, CLEF, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems journal, Neurocomputing journal, Experts Systems With Applications journal.

  • 2022: AAAI, SIGIR, CIKM, OSACT workshop, WANLP workshop, and IP&M journal.

  • 2021: ECIR, SIGIR, CIKM, CLEF.

  • 2020: ECIR, SIGIR, CIKM, ICTIR, WANLP workshop, CLEF, ICIoT.

• bigIR research lab Reading Group Coordinator. 

Teaching Activities

• 2021: Co-organizer and lab instructor for the Arabic Information Retrieval course.

Talks:

• Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! lab task 5 on authority finding in Twitter. CLEF conference, September 2023. 

• Finding and exploiting authorities for rumor verification in Twitter. Invited talk, IEEE Women in Engineering in Canada, July 2023.

• Detecting Stance of Authorities towards Rumors in Arabic Tweets: A Preliminary Study. ECIR conference, April 2023.

• Evidence-Based Early Rumor Verification in Social Media. ECIR conference, April 2022.

• ArCOV-19: The First Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset with Propagation Networks. WANLP workshop, April 2021.

• ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection. WANLP workshop, April 2021.

• Introduction to Machine Learning. Seminar, Qatar University Transportation and Traffic Safety Center, April 2018.

Awards and Achievements

• Received the Outstanding Reviewer Award at ECIR 2024 conference.

• Selected as a Twitter Developer Student Ambassador for the academic year 2022/2023.

• Best Paper Award at WANLP 2021 for paper titled "ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection."

• GSRA research grant funding from the Qatar National Research Fund to support the PhD study. August 2019.