On Friday January 26th Dr. Martino Mensio successfully defended his PhD thesis, with the title “Persuasion across the Political Spectrum: Quantifying Differences in Parallel News Reports”. Dr. Mensio’s PhD thesis delves into computational studies on News Media, focusing on parallel news reports, persuasion techniques, political leaning, and topics. The research examines language and persuasion techniques across diverse political leanings and topics in parallel news articles. Key contributions include improving political leaning classification, identifying how propaganda changes across the political spectrum, and identifying imbalances in propaganda detection datasets.

Harith Alani (KMi Director) and Alistair Willis (Senior Computer Lecturer at the OU), supervised his thesis, with Dr. Alessio Antonini (KMi Research Fellow) and Dr. Kieron O’Hara (Associate Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton) serving on his PhD committee.

Dr. Mensio anticipates transitioning to a career in applied Natural Language Processing within the industry.