2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (WASSA 2.011)
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http://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/congresos/wassa2011/
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* held in conjunction with ACL-HLT 2011, June 24, Portland, Oregon

* endorsed by SIGNLL - ACL’s Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning
* endorsed by SIGANN – ACL’s Special Interest Group for Annotation
* Extended versions of the best papers will be chosen for a special issue of the Decision Support Systems journal (published by Elsevier).
* WASSA 2.011 will organize an industry panel. Present confirmed participation from Appinions (Prof. Claire Cardie) and Beyond the Arc Consulting.
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Call for papers

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Recent years have marked the beginning and expansion of the Social Web, in which people freely express and respond to opinion on a whole variety of topics. While the growing volume of subjective information available allows for better and more informed decisions of the users, the quantity of data to be analyzed imposed the development of specialized Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that automatically detect subjectivity in text and subsequently extract, classify and summarize the opinions available on different topics. Although these research fields have been highly dynamic in the past years, dealing with subjectivity in text has proven to be a complex, interdisciplinary problem that remains far from being solved.

Inspired by the objectives we aimed at in the first edition of this workshop and the final outcome, the purpose of WASSA 2.011 is to create a framework for presenting and discussing the challenges related to subjectivity and sentiment analysis in NLP, from a theoretical and practical point of view. Moreover, taking into account that subjectivity-related phenomena have also been studied by other disciplines, such as Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, with WASSA 2.011 we would also like to open the door to an interdisciplinary dialogue on the nature, implications and applications of the topic(s) discussed. We envisage WASSA as a forum to discuss the achievements obtained so far and to analyse the different approaches to tackle the difficulties researchers are confronted with in this research area.



Topics of interest:

We encourage researchers to submit evaluation or position papers on topics including, but not restricted to:
• Affect, emotion, feeling, subjectivity, sentiment – concept definition and related NLP tasks;
• Resources for subjectivity and sentiment analysis;
• Subjectivity and opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, aggregation and summarization;
• Topic and sentiment studies and applications of topic-sentiment analysis;
• Mass opinion estimation based on NLP and statistical models;
• Domain, topic and genre dependency of sentiment analysis;
• Ambiguity and word sense disambiguation of subjective language;
• Proposals involving the computational treatment of large amounts of data;
• Pragmatic analysis of the opinion mining task;
• Use of Semantic Web technologies for subjectivity and sentiment analysis and/or emotion detection;
• Improvement of NLP tasks using subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis;
• Adaptation of traditional tasks to the opinion scenario: opinion IR, QA, summarization;
• Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methodologies;
• Real-world applications of opinion mining systems.

We also encourage participants to provide demos of their systems, thus giving them the opportunity to obtain feedback on their achievements and issues. At the same time, with the help of demos, we aim at enriching the discussion forum with application-specific topics for debate.

Organizers:

Alexandra Balahur, Ester Boldrini, Andrés Montoyo, Patricio Martínez-Barco

Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Alicante
Apartado de Correos 99, E-03080 Alicante, Spain
E-mail: {abalahur, eboldrini, montoyo, patricio}@dlsi.ua.es

Invited Speaker:

Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gratch (University of Southern California)
"Emotion theories, models and their relevance to sentiment analysis" (tentative)


Program Committee:

• Eneko Agirre - University of the Basque Country, Spain
• Nicoletta Calzolari - CNR Pisa, Italy
• Erik Cambria – University of Stirling, U.K.
• José Carlos Cortizo - European University Madrid, Spain
• Jesús M. Hermida - University of Alicante, Spain
• Veronique Hoste - University of Ghent, Belgium
• Mijail Kabadjov - EC-Joint Research Centre, Italy
• Zornitsa Kozareva - Information Sciences Institute, U.S.A.
• Rada Mihalcea - University of North Texas, U.S.A.
• Rafael Muñoz - University of Alicante, Spain
• Günter Neumann - DFKI, Germany
• Constantin Orasan - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
• Manuel Palomar - University of Alicante, Spain
• Viktor Pekar - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
• Paolo Rosso - Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
• Ralf Steinberger - EC- Joint Research Centre, Italy
• Veselyn Stoyanov - Cornell University, U.S.A.
• Carlo Strapparava - FBK, Italy
• Maite Taboada - Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Hristo Tanev - EC- Joint Research Centre, Italy
• Mike Thelwall - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
• José Antonio Troyano - University of Seville, Spain
• Dan Tufis - RACAI, Romania
• Taras Zagibalov - Brandwatch, U.K.


Submissions:

Submissions for WASSA 2.011 must not exceed eight (8) pages without references in camera-ready format (with a maximum of 2 pages for references). Over-length submissions will be rejected without review. Papers for WASSA should be submitted using the ACL-HLT 2011 Style Files, available at:
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission

Each accepted paper will be allocated eight (8) pages in the proceedings (plus a maximum of 2 pages for references). WASSA 2.011 also accepts papers presenting system demonstrations. Each demo paper will have four (4) pages allocated in the proceedings (plus one extra page for references). They must follow the same formatting guidelines as full papers. Submissions should be original, and in particular should not previously have been formally published.

Reviewing for WASSA 2.011 will be blind: reviewers will not be presented with the identity of paper authors. Authors should avoid writing anything that makes their identity obvious in the text. Submissions that do not comply with this criterion will be rejected without review.


Accepted papers will be published in the ACL WASSA proceedings, with ISBN. Extended versions of the best papers will be chosen for a special issue of the Decision Support Systems journal (published by Elsevier).

To access the submission system, please go to:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/wassa/


Important dates:

Paper due date (extended): April 1, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2011
Camera-ready deadline: May 06, 2011