*Scope of the Workshop*

The abundance of opinions available on the World Wide Web represents an information repository of enormous intellectual and economic value. Automated methods to exploit this rich knowledge mine have become more and more relevant within the last decade and the availability of large amounts of data is an ideal premise for the application of empirical methods.

Although many researchers from different nations and institutes intensively work on the development of these techniques, many challenges have been left uncovered: Among the highly relevant social media are new text types, that are fairly different from the types on which research in natural language processing has been conducted for the last 20 years. The most prominent example may be Twitter; with its condensed tweets it presents a sublanguage of its own. Traditional approaches often leave questions about the true nature of opinions unanswered. The actual emotion hidden in opinionated text is still hard to uncover; current lexical resources for sentiment analysis mostly only contain information about the polarity or subjectivity of terms, lacking relevant information of their emotional category. Fear or anger are treated equally, as are hope and joy. Emotional categories are projected onto two polarities, i.e. positive and negative, which oversimplifies reality. A further important aspect requiring methodological coverage is the exact analysis of the entities participating in the event evoked by an opinion. Robust linguistic techniques embedded in data-driven methods will possibly guide the way to answer questions on the actual target of an opinion or on the peer group holding this opinion. Another challenge is the automated assignment of polarity or subjectivity labels to the plethora of sentiment-related textual data readily available on the Web. State-of-the-art learning approaches, such as weakly-supervised or semi-supervised methods or distant supervision still need to be thoroughly examined for this purpose.

Another important aspect of this workshop is its focus on multi-linguality. Therefore, submissions for approaches devised and applied on languages other than English, in particular German, are strongly encouraged.

The workshop aims for providing a platform for researchers interested in the upcoming challenges of sentiment analysis and opinion mining. It intends to attract researchers settled in computational linguistics, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence alike. The workshop will be organized by the recently founded GSCL-Interest Group on German Sentiment Analysis (IGGSA): http://www.gscl.org/ak-stimmungsanalyse-en.html.



*Topics of Interest*

We invite contributions on, but not necessarily limited to:
- Genre- and domain-specific sentiment analysis
- Cross-genre and cross-domain sentiment analysis
- Semi-supervised/weakly supervised learning for sentiment analysis
- Contrast of machine learning vs. linguistic approaches vs. hybrid methods
- Sentiment analysis on twitter and social media in general
- Fine-to-coarse sentiment analysis
- Emotion detection and classification
- Representation of and calculus on emotions
- Multi-lingual sentiment analysis
- Lexical resources for opinion mining and sentiment analysis
- Gold standards and methods for evaluation
- Real-world applications and large-scale sentiment analysis
- Trends and perspectives in the field


*Important Dates*

Paper submission deadline: July 26, 2013
Acceptance notification: August 16, 2013
Workshop: September 23, 2013


*Submission Guidelines*

We will accept two types of submissions: full papers and extended abstracts. Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (http://www.jlcl.org). The editors-in-chief have already approved of publishing a special issue for 2014.
All accepted full papers and extended articles qualify for an oral presentation on the workshop.
Accepted full papers also qualify for a publication in JLCL. There will be two types of acceptances “Accept as is” and “Accept with Revision”. In the latter case, a revised version of the paper has to be submitted which will undergo a second review to safeguard that necessary revisions have been sufficiently implemented.
Accepted extended abstracts will not be published in the JLCL. However, authors of selected abstracts may be invited to submit a full paper for the journal. That submission will also undergo an additional review.
The purpose of extended abstracts is to allow interesting work in progress or project reports as contributions on the workshop that are not yet ripe for publication.
The submission guidelines of this workshop (w.r.t. the format of these types of papers) will follow the guidelines of the JLCL journal:
http://www.jlcl.org/index.php?modus=style_sheets
Full papers must not extend 12 pages (including references). Extended abstracts must not exceed 2 pages (including references).
The timeline for the first submissions (i.e. acceptance for presentation on the workshop) will follow the workshop timeline proposed by GSCL. The timeline for the publication of the special issue of JLCL still needs to be negotiated with the editorial office of JLCL.

The reviewing will be double blind. All submissions should describe original work that has not been previously published. We also accept demos, position papers (opinion pieces), and submissions discussing interesting negative results.


*Organizing committee*

Stefan Gindl (MODUL University Vienna, Austria)
Robert Remus (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Michael Wiegand (Saarland University, Germany)


*Program committee*
Cem Akkaya (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Alexandra Balahur (European Commission Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Simon Clematide (University of Zuerich, Switzerland)
Manfred Klenner (University of Zuerich, Switzerland)
Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)
Karo Moilanen (University of Oxford, UK)
Josef Ruppenhofer (Hildesheim University, Germany)
Manfred Stede (Potsdam University, Germany)
Ralf Steinberger (European Commission Joint Research Centre, Italy)
György Szarvas (Nuance Communications, Germany)
Maite Taboada (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Cigdem Toprak (Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany)