Speakers: Suman Maity, PhD

Suman Maity, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Missouri S&T

Suman Maity is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Missouri S&T. Prior to this role, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before that, he spent couple of years as a postdoctoral fellow at Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary areas of Social NLP and Responsible Machine Learning. His research contributions have been featured in top-tier international conferences and journals such as WWW, EMNLP, ACL, ICWSM, CSCW, AAMAS, Physical Review E etc.

Beyond Hate: Fact-Based Counter Narratives for Public Health and Digital Well-Being

Hate speech is more than just an online nuisance — it’s a serious public health concern, linked to anxiety, depression, and social isolation. Counter narratives offer a promising way to combat hate speech, but existing AI-generated responses often fall short, producing generic content or hallucinated facts. In this talk, I will present our approach to generate fact-based, non-aggressive counter narratives that leverage relevant background knowledge from multiple sources, including a web search module. I will also discuss how we rigorously evaluate these narratives using persuasion, factuality, and informativeness metrics—combining LLM-based assessments with human and NLP evaluations. Our method significantly outperforms existing models, achieving a factuality score of 0.915 compared to 0.741 and 0.701 for competitive baselines. By enhancing the credibility and impact of counter narratives, our work contributes to mitigating the harmful effects of hate speech, making it a powerful tool for improving public mental health.