== call for papers
==
== Analyzing short texts: Soft computing and other approaches
==
== special session of the
== International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications
== Trani (Italy), August 29-31, 2011
== http://wilf2011.di.uniba.it

Modern communication is increasingly centered on the exchange of shorter
and shorter messages. For instance, SMS messages must fit into a
140-characters limit, and so do Twitter's tweets. Results from web
search engines are summarized by short snippets, which often carry all
the requested information, avoiding a visit to the actual, referred
page. But even when no external constraint is imposed, texts tend to
become shorter and more up to the point, simply to avoid wasting time
and effort.

As these examples clearly indicate, the field of natural language
processing and interpretation is in need of efficient techniques to
tackle this kind of problems. Traditionally, analysis of natural
language texts assumes that several properties can be inferred by
statistical considerations. Such is the case, for instance, for tf-idf
weighting, where frequencies are lightheartedly assumed to stand for
probabilities proper, due to the abundance of terms in the documents of
a given collection. Another instance is provided by language detection,
which is obviously easier for longer texts allowing, e.g., grammatical
or structural analysis. When removing some of these assumptions,
uncertainty grows, and so does the need for methods that take it into
account explicitly.

This session is therefore devoted to advances in methods that do not
make large-sample assumptions, and instead take the challenge to tackle
the uncertainty that arises in the analysis of short text segments.
Submissions describing soft-computing approaches to the above problems,
as well as works blurring the border between different approaches, are
especially welcome. We are interested, for instance (but not
exclusively), in works dealing with the following topics:

- Extracting knowledge from short communications (SMS, Twitter, etc.)
- Identification of changes in language, topic and context within text paragraphs
- Language identification in multilingual text fragments
- Categorization of text snippets
- Word sense disambiguation in short texts

Submit your paper directly at
http://wilf2011.di.uniba.it/index.php/submission. Please select “Special
Session on Analyzing short texts”. Papers will go through the same peer
reviewing process as the rest of contributed papers.

All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings
(Springer-Verlag LNCS/LNAI)

submission: extended deadline February 4, 2011
review results February 21, 2011
final version and registration March 15, 2011
workshop August 29-31, 2011

GIRPR Prize: The Italian Group of Italian Researchers in Pattern
Recognition (GIRPR) will award a young researcher for the best paper
presented at WILF 2011. The award will consist of a €500 grant and a
two-years subscription to GIRPR. The selection of the winner will be
made by the general chairs of WILF 2011.


keynote speaker

Roberto Navigli, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
(tentative, to be confirmed)


organizers

Stefano Rovetta, University of Genova, Italy - ste@disi.unige.it
Paolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, Spain - prosso@dsic.upv.es


special session experts

Mikhail Alexandrov, Univ. Autónoma Barcelona, Spain
Pierpaolo Basile, Univ. degli Studi di Bari, Italy
Roberto Basili, Univ. di Roma, Tor Vergata, Italy
Dasha Bogdanova, Saint Petersburg University, Russia
Davide Buscaldi, Univ. d'Orléans, France
Leticia Cagnina, Univ. Nacional San Luis, Argentina
Roxana Danger, Univ. Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
Mirko Degli Esposti, Univ. di Bologna, Italy
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Univ. di Padova, Italy
Marcelo Errecalde, Univ. Nacional San Luis, Argentina
Pamela Forner, CELCT, Italy
Alfio Massimiliano Gliozzo, IBM Watson, USA
Lidia Moreno, Univ. Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
Alessandro Moschitti, Univ. di Trento, Italy
Marco Pennacchiotti, Yahoo! Labs, Santa Clara, USA
Emanuele Pianta, CELCT, Italy
David Pinto, Ben. Univ. Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico
Antonio Reyes, Univ. Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
Grigori Sidorov, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
Marco Turchi, EU Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy
Luís Villaseñor, INAOE-Puebla, Mexico
Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Univ. di Roma, Tor Vergata, Italy