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The 4th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2014)
at WWW 2014

http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/microposts2014

7 April 2014, Seoul, Republic of Korea

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THEME
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Making Sense of Microposts: Big things come in small packages

Microposts, such as Twitter status updates, Instagram likes and photos and Foursquare checkins, form a notable part of published web content. Smart phones, after overtaking sales of personal computers in 2012, now play a significant role in enabling ubiquitous communication, and have contributed to the steep increase in publication of Microposts, via native mobile apps and mobile-specific web sites. The increase in Micropost publication is evident across Twitter, where 500 million posts are now published every day, up from 175 million in 2012. Facebook sees 30 billion pieces of content shared on it every month. Such statistics reflect the growing production and consumption of data by users and the widespread sharing of information through social networks. The utility of Microposts is such that we are now providing up-to-date information about a range of topics formed in disparate contexts, providing information about emerging events, online presence, emergency response and crowd movement. Being able to make sense of Microposts therefore impacts on the ability to act upon information quickly and effectively, and aids the understanding of evolving user behaviour, events and public perception and opinion about their worlds.

The central objective of the #Microposts workshop is to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to discuss and debate current efforts toward analysing and understanding Microposts. We define a Micropost as information published on the Web that is small in size (e.g. a Tweet, Facebook share, Instagram like) and that requires minimal effort to publish. Although individual Microposts are small, collectively they provide a rich source of current information about a range of topics across all walks of life. Gleaning information from such content effectively requires a degree of understanding of what is being discussed and, with very large amounts, semi- to fully automated analytical and extraction approaches.
The workshop aims to provide a forum to enable discussion and hence, improve understanding of social and cultural phenomena that influence the publication and reuse of Microposts; and to discuss applications of Micropost data in a variety of contexts, including emergency response, crowd and event tracking, public opinion and sentiment analysis. Enabling the understanding and application of Micropost content requires analytical techniques and tools that function at scale and that can handle the high rate at which Microposts are published. The workshop invites submissions that deal with publication rate and scale, and approaches that facilitate understanding of Microposts through their semantics and where available, contextual information.

Microposts are both a technical and a social phenomenon, and the nature of the challenge related to their treatment is therefore multi-disciplinary. We continue to promote a multidisciplinary workshop, as achieved in the past three in the series, by also encouraging social scientists and other non-Computer Science researchers to submit work that looks at the theories behind Micropost usage and communication through this medium. The workshop also encourages demonstration of practical application of the results of analysis of Micropost data, both within the research community and in everyday, real-world scenarios. We encourage submissions using this and last year’s challenge data for contributions to the main track.



TOPICS OF INTEREST
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The workshop will focus on topics including, but not exclusive to, the three areas below:

Data mining from Microposts
-Emergent semantics
-Opinion mining, sentiment and sentic analysis
-Network analysis and community detection
-Influence detection and social contagion modelling
-Prediction approaches
-Linking Microposts into the Web of Data
-Semantic entity disambiguation

Social & Web Science Studies
-Collective awareness
-Education & citizen empowerment, data journalism
-Civil action, media & politics
-Political and polemical aspects of Microposts
-Ethics, legal and privacy issues
-Psychological profiles and psychological aspects of Micropost-based interactions
-Cultural and regional differences in access and use

Applications
-Collective intelligence, including user profiling, personalisation & recommendation
-Business analytics & market intelligence
-Event & topic detection and tendency tracking
-Microposts as second screen to TV
-Geo-localized, Micropost-based services
-Public consensus & citizen participation
-Security, emergency response & health
-Linking social and physical signals, in, e.g., crowd tracking




ENTITY EXTRACTION & DISAMBIGUATION CHALLENGE
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#Microposts2014 will host an 'Entity Extraction & Disambiguation Challenge', where participants must label Microposts in a given dataset with the entities referenced and their semantic web URIs. Existing entity extraction and
disambiguation tools are intended for use over news corpora and similar document-based corpora with relatively long length. The aim of the challenge is to foster research into novel, more accurate entity extraction and disambiguation
for (much shorter) Micropost data. Detailed information on how to enter the challenge will be provided in a separate call for challenge submissions as well as on the workshop website.



WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
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A keynote address from an invited speaker will open the day. This will be followed by paper presentations. We will hold a poster and demo session to trigger further, in-depth interaction between workshop participants. The last set of presentations will be brief overviews of selected submissions to the Entity Extraction & Disambiguation Challenge The workshop will close with the presentation of awards for the best paper and the highest ranking challenge submission.


SUBMISSIONS
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* Full papers: 8 pages ACM SIG format
* Short and position papers: 4 pages ACM SIG format
* Demos & Posters: 2 pages ACM SIG format
* Challenge extended abstracts: 5 pages Springer LNCS format

Main track submissions should be prepared according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Template (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates), and should include author names and affiliations, and 3-5 keywords.
Further detail for challenge submissions will be provided in a separate call.

Submission is via the EasyChair Conference System, at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=microposts2014. Where a submission includes additional material submission this should be made as a single, unencrypted zip file that includes a plain text file listing its contents.

Each submission will receive, in addition to a meta-review, at least 2 peer reviews, with full papers at least 3 peer reviews.

The workshop proceedings will be published through the ACM Digital Library.

IMPORTANT DATES
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Paper Submission deadline: ***7 Jan 2014***
Paper Notification: 4 Feb 2014
Camera-ready (hard) deadline (short & long papers): 12 Feb 2014

(all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time)

Workshop program issued: 15 Mar 2014
Main track proceedings to be published by ACM
Workshop - 7 April 2014 (Registration open to all)