The 5th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP) 2017
In conjunction with IEEE BigData @ December 11, 2017, Boston, MA, USA.

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/socialnlp2017/


****** Description ******

With the rapid growing of social networks and Web 2.0 services (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), being able to process data come from such platforms has gained much attention in recent years. SocialNLP is a new inter-disciplinary area of natural language processing (NLP) and social computing. We consider three plausible directions of SocialNLP: (1) addressing issues in social computing using NLP techniques; (2) solving NLP problems using information from social networks or social media; and (3) handling new problems related to both social computing and natural language processing.

Several challenges are foreseeable in SocialNLP. First, the message lengths on social media services are usually short (e.g. 140 characters per tweet in Twitter) and thus it is difficult to apply traditional NLP approaches directly. Second, social media contains heterogeneous information (e.g. tags, friends, fol-lowers, likes, and retweets) that should be considered together with the contents for better quality of analysis. Finally, microblog and the social media content always involve multiple persons with slangs and jargons, and usually require special techniques to process.

To encourage research in the area of SocialNLP, we have organized a SocialNLP SIG-group in AFNLP since 2012 (website: https://sites.google.com/site/socialnlp/home ) and made it a yearly based work-shop series. You can find the contents of the SocialNLP workshops of previous two years in the website. Through this workshop, we anticipate to provide a platform for research outcome presentation and head-to-head discussion in the area of SocialNLP, with the hope to combine the insight and experience of prominent researchers from both NLP and social computing fields to jointly contribute to the area of SocialNLP.


****** About SocialNLP 2017 ******

We aim at organizing the fifth SocialNLP workshop in IEEE BigData 2017 because of the following rationales. First, social media analysis with textual data is closely related to the technical development and application of big data analysis, data mining and machine learning. The most important of all, the processing of unstructured data is vital for big data analysis. Second, user-generated social data in online social services have been accumulated up to a large volume. Processing such social big data with linguistic knowledge and NLP techniques has encountered many important research problems. Third, user-generated data in social media is mainly in the form of texts. Theories and techniques on natural language processing and data mining are desired for semantic understanding, accurate search, and efficient processing of social data content. From the perspective of application, novel online applications involving NLP-based social media analysis, such as emergency management, social recommendation, user behavior analysis, user social community analysis and future prediction are topics that IEEE BigData researchers have paid attention to. In short, hosting SocialNLP workshop in IEEE BigData will provide mutually-reinforced benefits for researchers in areas of big data analysis, natural language processing and social media analytics. We believe collecting thoughts and comments of these researchers will also bring up many great ideas and opportunities for future research collaborations.

The most exciting thing is that we start to call for data paper this year to reach our aim of making data available to the research community by sharing datasets. Through the publication of data papers, SocialNLP participants can get familiar with the data by consulting the data creators in the workshop. We sincerely invite you to join us in this exciting event as well as share your experience, thoughts and comments on natural language processing for social media in your preferred time and venue!


****** Topics ******

Topics of interests for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Content analysis on Social Big Data
- Concept-level sentiment analysis
- Summarization of posts/replies on social media
- Name entity Recognition on Social media
- Relationship extraction on social media
- Entity resolution for social media
- Search, Indexing, and Evaluation on Social Web
- Improving Speech Recognition using Social Media Content
- Multilingual and Language specific Information Retrieval on Social Web

Natural language processing on Web 2.0 Big Data
- Folksonomy and Social Tagging
- Trend analysis on Wikipedia
- Trustworthiness analysis on Wikipedia
- Human computing for social-media corpus generation
- Social structure and position analysis using Microblog content
- Trust and Privacy analysis in social contexts
- Community detection using blogs or Microblog content

Sentiment and Opinion Analysis on Social Media
- Big social data analysis
- Lexical semantic resources, corpora and annotations of social media for sentiment analysis
- Opinion retrieval, extraction, classification, tracking and summarization
- Domain specific sentiment analysis and model adaptation Emotion detection
- Sentiment analysis for automatic public opinion poll and surveys of user satisfaction
- Improvement of NLP tasks using subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis on social platform
- Sentiment analysis and human computer interface on social platform
- Real-world sentiment applications and systems on social platform

Disaster Management Using Social Media Big Data
- Modeling global events or human activities based on social media texts
- Identification and geo-location of social media content
- Social-based web platform for disaster management
- Disaster or disease prediction and forecasting
- Resource allocation using social media
- Monitoring emergency responses among social crowds
- Analyzing the diffusion of emergent information
- Exploiting social media for crisis response and search and rescue activities

Large-Scale Models and Tools Development for SocialNLP
- Biologically-inspired opinion mining
- Social-network motivated methods or tools for natural language processing
- Advanced topic model for social media
- Learning to rank for social media
- Clustering and Classification tools for Social Media
- Content-based and social-based Recommendation
- Multi-lingual machine translation on Microblog


****** Paper Submission ******

SocialNLP review is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission: do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowl-edgments in papers submitted for review. In addition to regular paper, we call for DATA PAPER this year. A data paper should include the details of the created dataset and an experiment illustrating how to use it. Authors should note it as a data paper using the author field and submit at least partial data as accompanied materials. The created dataset should be able to be downloaded or acquired through an application process freely. If the data paper is accepted, we will list the link for accessing the dataset in the SocialNLP website. Note that the review for data papers is also double-blind and it is authors’ re-sponsibility to avoid revealing their identities.

Papers submitted to the SocialNLP workshop must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop, conference or journal. Papers should be written in English. Each submission will be evaluated by at least 3 program committee members. For SocialNLP@IEEE-BigData-2017, all accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

To pursue high quality submission, we will have a best paper award for both venues. The selection process will depend on not only the review comments/ratings, but also the quality of paper that is rated by paper authors. In addition, selected, expanded versions of papers presented at the workshop will be published in the follow-on Special Issue of the International Journal of Computational Linguis-tics and Chinese Language Processing (IJCLCLP) and we are working on the application of the Special Issue of the Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE).


****** Submissions Details ******

SocialNLP @ IEEE BigData 2017
- Page Limit: Regular papers: 8 pages, Data papers: 5 pages
- Template: https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html
- Submission Site: https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2017/bigdata17/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S34


****** Important Dates ******

SocialNLP @ IEEE BigData 2017
- Submission Deadline: October 10, 2017 (23:59 USA Eastern Standard Time)
- Author notification: November 1, 2017
- Camera-ready Submission: November 15, 2017
- Workshop Date: December 11, 2017


****** Organizers ******
Lun-Wei Ku, Academia Sinica
Cheng-Te Li, National Cheng Kung University


For other details, please visit our website! https://sites.google.com/site/socialnlp2017/
We are looking forward to seeing you in SocialNLP 2017!