MABSDA (Multidisciplinary Approaches to Big Social Data Analysis) is the WWW13 workshop on sentiment analysis and big social data mining, to be held this May in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The workshop aims to explore the new frontiers of big data computing for opinion mining through Semantic Web ontologies, rules, and services, Linked Data technologies, Web Science applications, knowledge-based systems, adaptive and transfer learning, in order to more efficiently retrieve and extract social information from the Web.

ABSTRACT
As the Web rapidly evolves, Web users are evolving with it. In an era of social connectedness, people are becoming more and more enthusiastic about interacting, sharing, and collaborating through social networks, online communities, blogs, Wikis, and other online collaborative media. In recent years, this collective intelligence has spread to many different areas, with particular focus on fields related to everyday life such as commerce, tourism, education, and health, causing the size of the Social Web to expand exponentially. The distillation of knowledge from such a large amount of unstructured information, however, is an extremely difficult task, as the contents of today's Web are perfectly suitable for human consumption, but remain hardly accessible to machines. The opportunity to capture the opinions of the general public about social events, political movements, company strategies, marketing campaigns, and product preferences has raised growing interest both within the scientific community, leading to many exciting open challenges, as well as in the business world, due to the remarkable benefits to be had from marketing and financial market prediction.

TOPICS
MABSDA aims to provide an international forum for researchers in the field of big data computing for 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 Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, Web Science, information retrieval, and natural language processing. In addition to paper presentations, an invited talk by Prof Bebo White will stress the interdisciplinary challenges of big social data analysis. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Affective ontologies
• Rules for opinion mining
• Web Science approaches to sentiment analysis
• Linked Data applications for sentiment mining
• Sentiment identification & classification
• Time evolving opinion & sentiment analysis
• Multi-modal sentiment analysis
• Multi-domain & cross-domain evaluation
• Knowledge base construction & integration with opinion analysis
• Transfer learning of opinion & sentiment with knowledge bases
• Sentiment topic detection & trend discovery
• Social ranking and social network content analysis
• Sentic computing
• Opinion spam detection

INVITED SPEAKER
Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (Retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the high-energy physics and basic energy science laboratory operated by Stanford University. Prior to his retirement, he was permanent staff/faculty at SLAC from 1981 to 2005. While his initial responsibilities at SLAC were in computational physics, in recent years Prof White's work has been dominated by his involvement with World Wide Web technology. He first became involved with WWW development while on sabbatical at CERN in 1989 and was instrumental in establishing the first non-European Web site at SLAC in 1991.

TIMEFRAME
• February 28th, 2013: Due date for workshop papers
• March 15th, 2013: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
• April 3rd, 2013: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• May 13th, 2013: Workshop date

SUBMISSIONS AND PROCEEDINGS
Submissions must be in PDF and must be done through EasyChair (http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mabsda13). Papers submitted to this workshop must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop, conference, or journal. Papers can be either full research papers (8 pages) or short papers (4 pages) and must be formatted to ACM SIG proceedings manuscript style. The workshop proceedings will be published through the ACM Digital Library. Selected, expanded versions of papers presented at the workshop will be published in a follow-on Special Issue of Springer’s Cognitive Computation journal.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
• Alexandra Balahur, University of Alicante (Spain)
• Praphul Chandra, HP Labs India (India)
• Amitava Das, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway)
• Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University (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)
• Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University (China)
• Isabelle Hupont, Aragon Institute of Technology (Spain)
• Lillian Lee, Yahoo Labs (USA)
• Shixia Liu, Microsoft Research Asia (China)
• Saif Mohammad, National Research Council (Canada)
• Muaz Niazi, Bahria University (Pakistan)
• Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia (Spain)
• Bjoern Schuller, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
• Stefano Squartini, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
• Rui Xia, Nanjing University of Science and Technology (China)
• Lei Zhang, University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)

ORGANIZERS
• Erik Cambria, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
• Yunqing Xia, Tsinghua University (China)
• Newton Howard, MIT Media Laboratory (USA)