Petra Kralj Novak

Petra Kralj Novak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University (CEU), and a researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. She specializes in knowledge discovery from databases, focusing on social and mainstream media analysis, particularly in sentiment analysis and hate speech detection combined with network analysis. Her work includes groundbreaking studies on emoji sentiment and the role of emojis in conveying emotion.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• BSc in Computer and Information Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Research Interests:

• Analysis of hate speech and misinformation dynamics
• Social media network structures and community evolution
• Machine learning applications for contextual and cross-lingual analysis
• EU-funded projects on political extremism and stroke outcome improvement

Key Projects:

• Coordinator of the EU-funded IMSyPP project on hate speech monitoring
• Theme leader for CIVICA's Data-Driven Technologies for Social Sciences
• Research in EU projects OppAttune and TRUSTroke

Publications: Over 50 papers, including seminal works on emoji sentiment analysis and hate speech datasets. Recent focus on multilingual hate speech modeling, community evolution in social networks, and annotation quality frameworks.