Demo Data from VLDB 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Mihaela Gaman
dblp:242/9258
· DBLP profile ↗
6ranked-venue papers
2as first author
5since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7751-6759ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 2 first-author · 5 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Network and information security
2 papers |
Malware analysis · 100% | |
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Information extraction and text analysis · 77% Question answering and dialogue systems · 23% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 6, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Malware analysis
malware classification |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat Research · AAAI 2026 |
Malware analysis
malware similarity |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | EMBERSim: A Large-Scale Databank for Boosting Similarity Search in Malware Analysis · NeurIPS 2023 |
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › text classification › semantic classification
complaint identification |
0.4 | 1 | 2019 | Automatically Identifying Complaints in Social Media · ACL (1) 2019 |
Malware analysis
malware detection |
0.2 | 1 | 2023 | EMBERSim: A Large-Scale Databank for Boosting Similarity Search in Malware Analysis · NeurIPS 2023 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
synthetic data generation · 1.0self-paced learning · 1.0large language model · 1.0similarity search · 0.7machine learning · 0.7neural classification · 0.4feature-based classification · 0.4distant supervision · 0.4
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat ResearchabstractGenerating thorough natural language explanations for threat detections remains an open problem in cybersecurity research, despite significant advances in automated malware detection systems. In this work, we present AutoMalDesc, an automated static analysis summarization framework that, following initial training on a small set of expert-curated examples, operates independently at scale. This approach leverages an iterative self-paced learning pipeline to progressively enhance output quality through synthetic data generation and validation cycles, eliminating the need for extensive manual data annotation. Evaluation across 3,600 diverse samples in five scripting languages demonstrates statistically significant improvements between iterations, showing consistent gains in both summary quality and classification accuracy. Our comprehensive validation approach combines quantitative metrics based on established malware labels with qualitative assessment from both human experts and LLM-based judges, confirming both technical precision and linguistic coherence of generated summaries. To facilitate reproducibility and advance research in this domain, we publish our complete dataset of more than 100K script samples, including annotated seed (900) and test (3.6K) datasets, along with our methodology and evaluation framework. Alexandru-Mihai Apostu, Andrei Preda, Alexandra Daniela Damir, Diana Bolocan, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Ioana Croitoru, Mihaela Gaman |
AAAI | 7 |
| 2023 | FreCDo: A Large Corpus for French Cross-Domain Dialect IdentificationabstractWe present a novel corpus for French dialect identification comprising 413,522 French text samples collected from public news websites in Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland. To ensure an accurate estimation of the dialect identification performance of models, we designed the corpus to eliminate potential biases related to topic, writing style, and publication source. More precisely, the training, validation and test splits are collected from different news websites, while searching for different keywords (topics). This leads to a French cross-domain (FreCDo) dialect identification task. We conduct experiments with four competitive baselines, a fine-tuned CamemBERT model, an XGBoost based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, and an SVM based on word n-grams. Aside from presenting quantitative results, we also make an analysis of the most discriminative features learned by CamemBERT. Our corpus is available in open-source format at https://github.com/MihaelaGaman/FreCDo. Mihaela Gaman, Adrian-Gabriel Chifu, William Domingues, Radu Tudor Ionescu |
KES | 1 |
| 2023 | EMBERSim: A Large-Scale Databank for Boosting Similarity Search in Malware AnalysisabstractIn recent years there has been a shift from heuristics based malware detection towards machine learning, which proves to be more robust in the current heavily adversarial threat landscape. While we acknowledge machine learning to be better equipped to mine for patterns in the increasingly high amounts of similar-looking files, we also note a remarkable scarcity of the data available for similarity targeted research. Moreover, we observe that the focus in the few related works falls on quantifying similarity in malware, often overlooking the clean data. This one-sided quantification is especially dangerous in the context of detection bypass. We propose to address the deficiencies in the space of similarity research on binary files, starting from EMBER — one of the largest malware classification datasets. We enhance EMBER with similarity information as well as malware class tags, to enable further research in the similarity space. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we publish EMBERSim, an augmented version of EMBER, that includes similarity informed tags; (2) we enrich EMBERSim with automatically determined malware class tags using the open-source tool AVClass on VirusTotal data and (3) we describe and share the implementation for our class scoring technique and leaf similarity method. Dragos Corlatescu, Alexandru Dinu, Mihaela Gaman, Paul Sumedrea |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2022 | The unreasonable effectiveness of machine learning in Moldavian versus Romanian dialect identificationabstractMotivated by the seemingly high accuracy levels of machine learning (ML) models in Moldavian versus Romanian dialect identification and the increasing research interest on this topic, we provide a follow-up on the Moldavian versus Romanian Cross-Dialect Topic Identification (MRC) shared task of the VarDial 2019 evaluation campaign. The shared task included two subtask types: one that consisted in discriminating between the Moldavian and Romanian dialects and one that consisted in classifying documents by topic across the two dialects of Romanian. Participants achieved impressive scores, for example, the top model for Moldavian versus Romanian dialect identification obtained a macro- F 1 score of 0.895. We conduct a subjective evaluation by human annotators, showing that humans attain much lower accuracy rates compared with ML models. Hence, it remains unclear why the methods proposed by participants attain such high accuracy rates. Our goal is to understand (i) why the proposed methods work so well (by visualizing the discriminative features) and (ii) to what extent these methods can keep their high accuracy levels, for example, when we shorten the text samples to single sentences or when we use tweets at inference time. A secondary goal of our work is to propose an improved ML model using ensemble learning. Our experiments show that ML models can accurately identify the dialects, even at the sentence level and across different domains (news articles vs. tweets). We also analyze the most discriminative features of the best performing models, providing some explanations behind the decisions taken by these models. Interestingly, we learn new dialectal patterns previously unknown to us or to our human annotators. Furthermore, we conduct experiments showing that the ML performance on the MRC shared task can be improved through an ensemble based on stacking. Mihaela Gaman, Radu Tudor Ionescu |
Int. J. Intell. Syst. | 1 |
| 2021 | Clustering Word Embeddings with Self-Organizing Maps. Application on LaRoSeDa - A Large Romanian Sentiment Data SetabstractRomanian is one of the understudied languages in computational linguistics, with few resources available for the development of natural language processing tools.In this paper, we introduce LaRoSeDa, a Large Romanian Sentiment Data Set 1 , which is composed of 15,000 positive and negative reviews collected from one of the largest Romanian e-commerce platforms.We employ two sentiment classification methods as baselines for our new data set, one based on low-level features (character n-grams) and one based on highlevel features (bag-of-word-embeddings generated by clustering word embeddings with kmeans).As an additional contribution, we replace the k-means clustering algorithm with self-organizing maps (SOMs), obtaining better results because the generated clusters of word embeddings are closer to the Zipf's law distribution, which is known to govern natural language.We also demonstrate the generalization capacity of using SOMs for the clustering of word embeddings on another recentlyintroduced Romanian data set, for text categorization by topic. Anca Maria Tache, Mihaela Gaman, Radu Tudor Ionescu |
EACL | 2 |
| 2019 | Automatically Identifying Complaints in Social MediaabstractComplaining is a basic speech act regularly used in human and computer mediated communication to express a negative mismatch between reality and expectations in a particular situation.Automatically identifying complaints in social media is of utmost importance for organizations or brands to improve the customer experience or in developing dialogue systems for handling and responding to complaints.In this paper, we introduce the first systematic analysis of complaints in computational linguistics.We collect a new annotated data set of written complaints expressed in English on Twitter. 1 We present an extensive linguistic analysis of complaining as a speech act in social media and train strong feature-based and neural models of complaints across nine domains achieving a predictive performance of up to 79 F1 using distant supervision. Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Mihaela Gaman, Nikolaos Aletras |
ACL (1) | 2 |