Ebuka J. Okpala

okpalaje@gmail.com
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Welcome!

I currently work at Apple in the Siri organization where I work on software and machine learning systems that intend to improve the Siri experience in the home.

Prior to that, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Clemson University. My dissertation focused on offensive content detection on online social platforms. In my projects, I applied machine learning and natural language processing to detect offensive content and to understand and mitigate bias in offensive content detection models.

I also have a master's degree in Computer Science from Clemson University and a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

Publications and Posters

  • Large Language Model Annotation Bias in Hate Speech Detection.
    Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng. International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2025 (In submission).
  • Analyzing Offensive Content and Emotional Dynamics in Black Lives Matter Discourse on Twitter.
    Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng. International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2025 (Accepted).
  • Analysis of COVID-19 Offensive Tweets and Their Targets.
    Song Liao, Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng, Nishant Vishwamitra, Mingqi Li, Hongxin Hu, Feng Luo, Matthew Costello. ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2023.
  • AI-Cybersecurity Education Through Designing AI-based Cyberharassment Detection Lab.
    Ebuka Okpala, Nishant Vishwamitra, Keyan Guo, Song Liao, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu, Yongkai Wu, Xiaohong Yuan, Jeannette Wade, Sajad Khorsandroo. IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2023. (Accepted)
  • AAEBERT: Debiasing BERT-based Hate Speech Detection Models via Adversarial Learning.
    Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng, Nicodemus Mbwambo, Feng Luo. International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2022.
  • COVID-HateBERT: a Pre-trained Language Model for COVID-19 related Hate Speech Detection.
    Mingqi Li, Song Liao, Ebuka Okpala, Max Tong, Matthew Costello, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu, Feng Luo. International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2021.
  • COVID-19: A Pandemic of Anti-Asian Cyberhate.
    Matthew Costello, Long Cheng, Feng Luo, Hongxin Hu, Song Liao, Nishant Vishwamitra, Mingqi Li, Ebuka Okpala. Journal of Hate Studies (JHS), 2021.
  • Understanding and Mitigating Biases in BERT-based Hate Speech Detection Models.
    Ebuka Okpala, Long Cheng, Nicodemus Mbwambo, Feng Luo. IEEE Secure Development Conference (SecDev), 2022 poster.
  • BranchCorr: Detecting Incompatible Branch Behavior by Enforcing Branch Correlation Integrity.
    Long Cheng, Ebuka Okpala, Song Liao, Danfeng(Daphne) Yao. IEEE Secure Development Conference (SecDev), 2019 poster.