Memory and data capacities double approximately every two years and, apparently, the Web is following the same rule. User-generated contents, in particular, are an ever-growing source of opinion and sentiments which are continuously spread worldwide through blogs, wikis, fora, chats and social networks. The distillation of knowledge from such sources is a key factor for applications in fields such as commerce, tourism, education and health, but the quantity and the nature of the contents they generate make it a very difficult task.

Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis can be grouped into four main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified according to the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion or opinion polarity; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus; finally sentic computing, which uses affective ontologies and common sense reasoning tools for a concept-level analysis of natural language text.

The main aim of SENTIRE (Latin for 'feel', root of words such as sentiment and sensation) is to explore the new frontiers of opinion mining and sentiment analysis by proposing novel techniques in fields such as AI, Semantic Web, knowledge-based systems, adaptive and transfer learning, in order to more efficiently retrieve and extract social information from the Web.

Topics of Interest:
SENTIRE aims to provide an international forum for researchers in the field of opinion mining and sentiment analysis to share information on their latest investigations in social information retrieval and their applications both in academic research areas and industrial sectors. The broader context of the workshop comprehends Web mining, AI, Semantic Web, information retrieval and natural language processing. In addition to paper presentations, an invited talk by Professor Bing Liu will stress the interdisciplinary challenges of opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Opinion & sentiment summarization and visualization
- Explicit and latent semantic analysis for opinion & sentiment mining
- Knowledge base construction and integration with opinion & sentiment analysis
- Transfer learning of opinion & sentiment with knowledge bases
- Time evolving opinion & sentiment analysis
- Opinion & sentiment extraction and retrieval

Schedule:
- August 5th, 2011: Due date for workshop papers
- September 20th, 2011: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
- October 11th, 2011: Camera-ready of accepted papers
- December 11th, 2011: Workshop date

Submissions:
Papers submitted to this workshop must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop, conference or journal. Submissions can be either full research papers (8 pages) or short papers (6 pages) and must be formatted to IEEE Computer Society proceedings manuscript style. Papers are to be submitted by August 5th (11.59pm PST) through IEEE ICDM11 web interface (http://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2011/icdm11/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S2)

Proceedings:
Accepted papers will be published in ICDM SENTIRE proceedings. Selected, expanded versions of papers presented at the workshop will be published in a follow-on Special Issue of Springer's Cognitive Computation journal (http://springer.com/12559)

Invited Speaker:
- Bing Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)

Program Committee:
- Alexandra Balahur, University of Alicante (Spain)
- Sandra Baldassarri, University of Zaragoza (Spain)
- Eva Cerezo, University of Zaragoza (Spain)
- Praphul Chandra, HP Labs India (India)
- Sergio Decherchi, Italian Institute of Technology (Italy)
- Rafael Del Hoyo, Aragon Institute of Technology (Spain)
- Tariq Durrani, University of Strathclyde (UK)
- Marco Grassi, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
- Isabelle Hupont, Aragon Institute of Technology (Spain)
- Kenneth Kwok, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
- Shixia Liu, Microsoft Research Asia (China)
- Jinhu Lu, Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
- Saif Mohammad, National Research Council (Canada)
- Muaz Niazi, University of Stirling (UK)
- Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia (Spain)
- Bjoern Schuller, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
- Stefano Squartini, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
- Jose Troyano, University of Seville (Spain)
- Lei Zhang, University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)
- Chengqing Zong, Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)

Organizers:
- Erik Cambria, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
- Yangqiu Song, Microsoft Research Asia (China)
- Catherine Havasi, MIT Media Laboratory (USA)
- Amir Hussain, University of Stirling (UK)