Isabelle van der Vegt
Bio
I am a PhD student at the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. I also work as a research assistant on the ERC-funded GRIEVANCE project. The focus of my research is understanding threats of violence by using computational linguistics. I currently work on projects examining language use in lone actor terrorist manifestos, extremist forums and YouTube videos, and threats to public figures.
News (Spring 2019)
- We have conducted interviews with social media companies for our project on human-machine integration for extremist content removal. The project is funded by RUSI (with Paul Gill, Stuart Macdonald, and Bennett Kleinberg and a report will be published on their website shortly.
- I will speak at the Terrorism & Social Media conference in Swansea, 25-26 June 2019. The talk will focus on linguistic trajectories of YouTube’s alt-right.
- I will speak at the Society for Terrorism Research conference in Oslo, 20-21 June 2019. My talk will focus on developing the GRIEVANCE dictionary: understanding terrorist language use (with Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill). I am also a co-author for the paper presentation: Towards Open and Reproducible Terrorism Studies (with Sandy Schumann, Bart Schuurman, & Paul Gill).
Brief CV
- 2018-present: PhD student UCL Department of Security & Crime Science, supervised by Paul Gill & Bennett Kleinberg
- 2015-2017: Research Master’s degree in Psychology, University of Amsterdam
- 2012-2015: Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences (Psychology + Linguistics), University College Utrecht
Recent publications & pre-prints
- Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., Arntz, A., Verschuere, B. (pre-print). Detecting deceptive communication through linguistic concreteness. Paper here.
- Kleinberg, B., Mozes, M., & van der Vegt, I. (2018). Identifying the sentiment styles of YouTube’s vloggers. Proceedings of EMNLP 2018. Click here for the paper, data, and code.
Previous talks
- I co-organised a workshop on linguistic temporal trajectory analyis at the European Computational Social Science symposium 2018. You can find more information here.
- Violent mood swings: intra-textual sentiment of lone-actor manifestos. Talk at VOX-POL: Violent extremism, terrorism, and the internet: present and future trends, Amsterdam, Netherlands (August 21, 2018). Slides and data.
- Violent mood swings: intra-textual sentiment of violent lone actor manifestos. Talk at the annual Society for Terrorism Research conference, Liverpool, UK (September 6, 2018).