Final Call for Papers

ACL workshop on NLP and Social Dynamics, collocated with ACL 2014
Baltimore, USA

Submission deadline: Friday, March 28, 2014
Worhshop date: June 27, 2014

Details: https://sites.google.com/site/orentsur/acl-workshop-on-nlp-and-social-dynamics

Confirmed panelists:
Hanna Wallach (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Jacob Eisenstein (Georgia Tech), and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil ( Max Plank Institute SWS)

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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

Language is a set of publicly agreed conventions that serves the purpose of inter-personal communication. Speakers (or writers) try to convey a message, instill an idea or make an impression on the listeners. Listeners (or readers), in turn, are affected by the message and may respond to it. Language, in that sense, is an important vehicle that shapes (and is shaped by) social dynamics.
Traditional NLP research, however, focuses on ‘documents’ (either of full length or on the sentence level), rather than on the communication process as reflected by language use. Common examples of traditional NLP research are parsing, document classification, machine translation, and sentiment analysis at the sentence and document level without considering the social dynamics of the people who are writing and reading those texts.
In this workshop we move beyond analyzing the informational aspect of documents and discuss ways in which NLP can contribute to gaining insights about the interplay between language use and various levels of social dynamics.
The first Workshop on NLP and Social Dynamics is aiming at bringing together researchers from various disciplines such as computational linguistics, web science, sociology and digital humanities to demonstrate and discuss the potential of the state-of-the-art NLP algorithms applied to social and historical data.

The workshop will will feature long and short presentations and a panel discussion of critical issues at the intersection of computational linguistics and social science.


TOPICS

- Demographics, identity making, and psychological view of social media language
- Emergence and diffusion of slang and neologisms
- Emergence of metaphors
- Emotion dynamics in social media conversation threads
- Evolution of word formation and word meaning
- Language coordination and lexical entrainment
- Language evolution through history
- Language variation across communities
- Linguistic (phonological, morphological, etc) factors in word formation
- Linguistic and social factors in acceptance of new words and phrases
- Linguistic factors in information diffusion and information cascades.
- NLP techniques for analyzing social media
- Online (social) news outlets and public opinion
- Persuasive language and (online) campaigns
- Pragmatics of language
- Social dynamics in (blog/news story) comment threads
- Social relationships and language use
- Sociolinguistic perspective of social media language use


IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission deadline (long & short papers): March 28, 2014
- Author notification: April 14, 2014
- Camera ready: April 28, 2014
- Workshop: June 27, 2014

ORGANIZERS

Alice Oh KAIST, currently visiting Harvard University
Oren Tsur Harvard University, Northeastern University


FORMATTING and SUBMISSION

We welcome long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) submissions. All submissions must be electronic, complying with the general ACL formatting and submission guidelines.

We allow authors of accepted papers to apply for a non-archival acceptance in order to allow publication in Linguistics / Social Science journals.

Submission are only possible via the START system.
Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/acl2014/NLPSD/

MORE DETAILS

https://sites.google.com/site/orentsur/acl-workshop-on-nlp-and-social-dynamics