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the 5th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop
(#Microposts2015)
at WWW 2015

http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/microposts2015

18th/19th May 2015

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THEME: Big things come in small packages
-------------------

The #Microposts workshops aim to bring together researchers
from multiple disciplines to debate current, leading edge
effort toward analysing and understanding Microposts -
"information published on the Web that is small in size and
requires minimal effort to publish (e.g. a Tweet, Facebook
share, Instagram like, Google +1)". Although individual
Microposts are small and therefore typically focus on a
single thought, message or theme, collectively they provide
a rich source of information and opinion about a range of
topics. The workshop aims to continue to provide a forum to
enable discussion and hence, improve understanding of
social and cultural phenomena that influence the
publication and reuse of Microposts; to assess different
approaches to gleaning the information content of Micropost
data; and discuss application of this knowledge content in
a variety of contexts, including emergency response, crowd
and event tracking, mass communication, opinion mining and
sentiment !
analysis. Enabling the understanding and application of
Microposts requires techniques and tools that function at
scale, and that are able to handle the very high rate at
which Microposts are published.

Despite advances in the development of tools to tackle the
specific challenges inherent in Micropost data,
applications and approaches for analysing Microposts for
different tasks still rely on the use of third party text
extraction tools. Such tools are typically applied to
extract entities and concepts contained in Microposts. One
issue here is the lack of formal evaluation of the accuracy
of text extraction tools specifically for Micropost data;
instead, comparative assessment using corpora of well-
formed, normal length, natural language documents is
reported. To address this issue, starting with #MSM2013,
the workshop hosted an entity extraction challenge in which
participants detected named entities typed with
corresponding concepts (e.g. 'Barack Obama' is a Person).
In 2014, the challenge was extended to require also the
linking of entities extracted to relevant DBpedia sources.
For #Microposts2015 we propose to go one step further and
extend the challenge by not only !
testing the accuracy of entrants' systems in extracting
entities and linking them with DBpedia, but also assessing
the runtime efficiency of the submitted systems. Evolution
of the challenge each year addresses a current need of
researchers and others who rely on the output of text
extraction tools, where reliability and computation time
are important when dealing with large-scale datasets.



TOPICS OF INTEREST
-------------------

#Microposts2015 will focus on topics including, but not
exclusive to, the three areas below:

UNDERSTAND: With a focus on the human in Micropost data
generation and analysis, we encourage submissions that look
at understanding how situation and context drive individual
and collective generation of Microposts, whether targeted
at the general public, a specific person or other entity,
e.g. a ruling government or a cause. We particularly
encourage interdisciplinary work and that driven by
research in the Social, Information & Web Sciences, that
lead to deeper understanding of the content of Microposts,
and how this content influences the contribution of
Micropost data to, among others:

- Collective awareness
- Education & citizen empowerment, data & citizen
journalism
- Civil action, media & politics
- Political and polemical aspects of Microposts
- Ethics, legal and privacy issues
- Psychological profiling and psychological aspects
of Micropost-based interaction
- Cultural, generational and regional differences
in access and use
- Impact of effortless posting and wearable devices
on communication

DISCOVER: The extraction of information content from
Micropost data and its subsequent analysis contribute to
the discovery of patterns and trends in the data. This
information is key to further knowledge discovery and
application, using a number of approaches including:
- Emergent semantics
- Data mining from Microposts
- 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 Linked Data
(i.e. entity extraction and URI disambiguation)

APPLY: Applications papers and case studies describing
systems related, but not limited, to:
- Collective intelligence, user profiling,
personalisation & recommendation
- Business analytics & market intelligence
- Event & topic detection and tendency tracking
- Microposts as second screen to television
- Geo-localised, Micropost-based services
- Public consensus & citizen participation
- Security, emergency response & health
- Linking social and physical signals for, e.g.,
crowd tracking





SOCIAL SCIENCES TRACK
----------------------
To foster collaboration between Computer Science and Social
Sciences, and continue to encourage contribution from the
latter domain to improve on 'Making Sense of Microposts',
there will be a special track dedicated to Social Science
papers. This track will be chaired by Katrin Weller (GESIS,
Germany) and Danica Radovanović (University of Novi Sad,
Serbia), long-time members of the #Microposts workshop
program committee. Details of this track will be sent out
in a separate call for papers.




NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION AND LINKING CHALLENGE
-----------------------------------------------
On the back of two very successful challenges in 2013 and
2014, that saw widespread interest, we have already
obtained sponsorship from SPAZIODATI for a financial award
for the highest ranking submission. Each year the challenge
has allowed a valuable overview of the state of the art and
has received expressions of interest and submissions from
both industry and academia. We have also seen continued
interest after publication of the results in each year. We
expect this to continue in 2015, with the extension of the
challenge to recognize entities, and type them before
linking to the corresponding DBpedia entities. We will also
measure the runtime computation efficiency of submitted
systems. In line with the overall workshop goals, we
envisage that the outcomes of the challenge submissions
will continue to advance work in the domains of named
entity recognition and entity disambiguation, with a
specific focus on function over the short length
information snippets in Micropost!
s. A detailed description of the challenge will be
published in a separate call.





WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
-------------------

A keynote address from an invited speaker will open the
day, and 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 Challenge. The workshop will close with
the presentation of awards.




SUBMISSIONS
------------

Full papers: 8 pages
Short and position papers: 4 pages
Demos & Posters: 2 pages
Social Sciences track: 2/4 pages
Challenge extended abstracts: 2 pages (with challenge
results)

All written 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 author-selected keywords. 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.

Submission is via EasyChair, at:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=microposts2015.


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


The #Microposts2015 proceedings will be published as a
single volume containing all three tracks, via CEUR. The
same publication conditions however apply as for other
workshop proceedings included in the WWW conference
companion:
"Any paper published by the ACM, IEEE, etc. which can be
properly cited constitutes research which must be
considered in judging the novelty of a WWW submission,
whether the published paper was in a conference, journal,
or workshop. Therefore, any paper previously published as
part of a WWW workshop must be referenced and suitably
extended with new content to qualify as a new submission to
the Research Track at the WWW conference."

Note this caveat does not apply to extended abstracts
submitted to the special Social Sciences track summarising
or discussing previously published work or presenting
position statements.




IMPORTANT DATES
----------------

Main Track submission deadline: *24 Jan 2015*
Social Sciences Track submission deadline: *07 Feb 2015*

Notification: 22 Feb 2015
Camera-ready (hard) deadline (Main & Social Sciences
tracks): 8 Mar 2015


Challenge timeline:
Intent to participate: *20 Feb 2015*
Challenge submission deadline: *28 March 2015*
Other dates (incl. release of datasets) TB

(all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time)

Workshop - 18/19 May 2015 (registration open to all)





CONTACT
-------

E-mail: microposts2015@easychair.org
Mailing list: microposts2015@googlegroups.com

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?
sk=group_180472611974910

Twitter persona: @microposts2015
Twitter hashtag: #microposts2015

W3C Microposts Community Group:
http://www.w3.org/community/microposts


ORGANISERS
-----------

Matthew Rowe, Lancaster University, UK
Milan Stankovic, Université Paris-Sorbonne & Sépage, France
Aba-Sah Dadzie, University of Birmingham, UK


Program Committee
------------------

Gholam R. Amin, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy
Julie Birkholz, Vrije University, The Netherlands
John Breslin, NUIG, Ireland
Amparo E. Cano, KMi, Open University, UK
Marco Antonio Cassanova, PUC-Rio, Brazil
Óscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Ali Emrouznejad, Aston Business School, UK
Guillaume Erétéo, INRIA, France
Miriam Fernandez, KMi, Open University, UK
Andrés García-Silva, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,
Spain
Anna Lisa Gentile, University of Sheffield, UK
Jelena Jovanovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Mathieu Lacage, Alcméon, France
Philippe Laublet, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France
João Magalhães, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
José M. Morales del Castillo, El Colegio de México, Mexico
Fabrizio Orlandi, University of Bonn, Germany
Bernardo Pereira Nunes, PUC-Rio, Brazil
Danica Radovanović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Giuseppe Rizzo, Eurecom, France
Harald Sack, University of Potsdam, Germany
Bernhard Schandl, mySugr GmbH, Austria
Sean W. M. Siqueira, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil
Raphaël Troncy, Eurecom, France
Victoria Uren, Aston Business School, UK
Andrea Varga, The University of Sheffield, UK
Shenghui Wang, OCLC Research, The Netherlands
Katrin Weller, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social
Sciences, Germany
Alistair Willis, The Open University, UK
Ziqi Zhang, University of Sheffield, UK



SOCIAL SCIENCES TRACK
--------------------------------

CHAIRS:
Danica Radovanović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Katrin Weller, GESIS, Germany


Program Committee (to be completed)
-----------------------------------------

Athina Karatzogianni, University of Leicester, UK
Fabio Giglietto, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy
Luca Rossi, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy
Saskia Vanmanen, The Open University, UK
Alistair Willis, The Open University, UK
Taha Yasseri, Oxford Internet Institute, UK



CHALLENGE EVALUATION COMMITTEE:
--------------------------------

CHAIRS:
A. Elizabeth Cano, KMi, Open University, UK
Giuseppe Rizzo, Eurecom, France
Andrea Varga, The University of Sheffield, UK

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SPONSOR: SpazioDati ( http://www.spaziodati.eu )
--------------------------------


Program Committee
--------------------------------

Gabriele Antonelli, SpazioDati, Italy
Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada
Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy
Leon Derczynski, The University of Sheffield, UK
Milan​ Dojchinovski, Czech Technical University, Prague
Guillaume Erétéo, INRIA, France
Andrés García-Silva, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,
Spain
Anna Lisa Gentile, University of Sheffield, UK
Miguel Martinez-Alvarez, Signal, London, UK
José M. Morales del Castillo, El Colegio de México, Mexico
Georgios Paltoglou, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Bernardo Pereira Nunes, PUC-Rio, Brazil
Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Giles Reger, Otus Labs Ltd, Sheffield, UK
Irina Temnikova, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
Raphaël Troncy, Eurecom, France
Victoria Uren, Aston Business School, UK