----------------------------------------------------------
*PAN-08 - Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse*
----------------------------------------------------------

In conjunction with the ECAI 2008
18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Patras, Greece, 21-25 July 2008
http://www.aisearch.de/pan-08

----------------------------------------------------------
About this Workshop:
----------------------------------------------------------

The workshop shall bring together experts and researchers around the
exciting and future-oriented topics of plagiarism analysis, authorship
identification, and the detection of social software misuse. The
development of new solutions for these problems can benefit from the
combination of existing technologies, and in this sense the workshop
provides a platform that spans different views and approaches. The
following list gives examples from the outlined fields for which
contributions are welcome, but not restricted to:

Plagiarism analysis:

- plagiarism detection in general, in Web communities and social
networks, and cross-language plagiarism
- identifying near-duplicate and versioned documents of all kinds:
text, software, image, music, sound
- technology for high-similarity retrieval such as fingerprinting and
similarity hashing

Authorship identification:

- models for authorship identification, authorship attribution, and
writing style
- NLP- and knowledge-based retrieval models to capture personal traits
and sentiment
- Web forensics, community fraud, and new Web infringements

Social Software Misuse Detection:

- uncovering serial sharing and lobbying
- monitoring vandalism, trolling, or stalking
- trust, psychological and personality-based user studies, social
aspects of Web misuse

Some background:

Plagiarism analysis is a collective term for computer-based methods to
identify a plagiarism offense. In connection with text documents we
distinguish between corpus-based and intrinsic analysis: the former
compares suspicious documents against a set of potential original
documents, the latter identifies potentially plagiarized passages by
analyzing the suspicious document with respect to changes in writing
style.

Authorship identification divides into so-called attribution and
verification problems. In the authorship attribution problem, one is given
examples of the writing of a number of authors and is asked to determine
which of them authored given anonymous texts. In the authorship
verification problem, one is given examples of the writing of a single
author and is asked to determine if given texts were or were not
written by
this author. As a categorization problem, verification is significantly
more difficult than attribution. Authorship verification and intrinsic
plagiarism analysis represent two sides of the same coin.

Social software such as Web logs, sharing sites for photos and videos,
wikis and on-line forums contribute up to one third of new Web
content. "Social Software Misuse" is a collective term for anti-social
behavior in online communities; an example is the distribution of spam via
the e-mail infrastructure. Interestingly, spam is one of the few misuses
for which detection technology is developed at all, though various
forms of
misuse exist that threaten the different online communities. Our workshop
shall close this gap and invites contributions concerned with all kinds of
social software misuse.

----------------------------------------------------------
Important Dates:
----------------------------------------------------------

April 20, 2008 Deadline for paper submission
May 10, 2008 Notification to authors
May 26, 2008 Camera-ready copy due
July 21-22, 2008 Workshop opens

Contributions will be peer-reviewed by experts from the related field.

----------------------------------------------------------
Workshop Organization:
----------------------------------------------------------

Benno Stein, Bauhaus University Weimar
Efstathios Stamatatos, University of the Aegean
Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Contact: pan-08@aisearch.de
Information about the workshop can be found at
http://www.aisearch.de/pan-08