Publications

  • Towards Improving Food Inspection Reporting Procedures: Data Mining to Uncover Bias and Inconsistencies in Written Food Inspection Reports Morales, Alex, George Heintz, Jim Roberts and Chengxiang Zhai. (Under Review)

  • Drink bleach or do what now? Covid-HeRA: A dataset for risk-informed health decision making in the presence of COVID19 misinformation Dharawat, Arkin, Ismini Lourentzou, Alex Morales, ChengXiang Zhai Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 16. 2022. [paper | bibtex]

  • Identifying False Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Information and Corresponding Risk Perceptions from Twitter Using Advanced Predictive Models Tomaszewski, Tre, Alex Morales, Ismini Lourentzou, Bing Liu, Alan Schwartz, Rachel Caskey and Jessie Chin. Journal of medical Internet research 23.9 (2021): e30451. [HPV misinfo terms figure | paper | bibtex]

  • Estimating the influence of Twitter on pre-exposure prophylaxis use and HIV testing as a function of rates of men who have sex with men in the United States. Chan, Man-Pui Sally, Alex Morales, Maria Zlotorzynski, Patrick Sullivan, Travis Sanchez, ChengXiang Zhai, and Dolores Albarracin. AIDS 35 (2021): S101-S109. [paper | bibtex]

  • Drink bleach or do what now? Covid-HeRA: A dataset for risk-informed health decision making in the presence of COVID19 misinformation Dharawat, Arkin, Ismini Lourentzou, Alex Morales, ChengXiang Zhai NLP-COVID19 Workshop @ ACL 2020 [paper | poster | code | bibtex ]

  • Model-based feature construction and text representation for social media analysis. Morales, Alex. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2020. [paper | bibtex ]

  • CrowdQM: Learning aspect-level user reliability and comment trustworthiness in discussion forums Morales, Alex, Kanika Narang, Hari Sundaram, and Chengxiang Zhai. In Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 592-605. Springer, Cham, 2020. [paper | code | dataset | bibtex]

  • Predicting Opioid Overdose Crude Rates with Text-Based Twitter Features (Student Abstract). Gandhi, Nupoor, Alex Morales, Sally Man-Pui Chan, Dolores Albarracin, and ChengXiang Zhai. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 34, no. 10, pp. 13787-13788. 2020. [paper | bibtex]

  • Multi-Attribute Topic Feature Construction for Social Media-based Prediction. Morales, Alex, Nupoor Gandhi, Man-pui Sally Chan, Sophie Lohmann, Travis Sanchez, Kathleen A. Brady, Lyle Ungar, Dolores Albarracín, and ChengXiang Zhai. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Seattle, WA, USA, 2018, pp. 1073-1078 [paper | bibtex]

  • An Online Risk Index for the Cross-Sectional Prediction of New HIV Chlamydia, and Gonorrhea Diagnoses Across U.S. Counties and Across Years Chan, Man-pui Sally, Sophie Lohmann, Alex Morales, Chengxiang Zhai, Lyle Ungar, David R. Holtgrave, and Dolores Albarracín. AIDS and Behavior 22, no. 7 (2018): 2322-2333. [paper | bibtex]

  • Text-based geolocation prediction of social media users with neural networks Lourentzou, Ismini, Alex Morales, and ChengXiang Zhai. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), pp. 696-705. IEEE, 2017. [paper | bibtex]

  • Identifying Humor in Reviews using Background Text Sources Morales, Alex, and ChengXiang Zhai. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 492-501. 2017. [paper | bibtex]

  • Synthetic review spamming and defense Sun, Huan, Alex Morales, and Xifeng Yan In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pp. 1088-1096. ACM, 2013. [paper | bibtex]

  • Synthetic review spamming and defense (Short Paper) Morales, Alex, Huan Sun and Xifeng Yan In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 155-156. 2013. [paper | bibtex]

Book Chapter

  • Social Media Harvesting Chan, Man-pui Sally, Alex Morales, Mohsen Farhadloo, Ryan Joseph Palmer, and Dolores Albarracín. In H. Blanton, J. M. LaCroix, & G. D. Webster (Eds.), Frontiers of social psychology. Measurement in social psychology (p. 228–264). 2019