Fourth Workshop on Social News on the Web (SNOW 2017)
Co-located with WWW '17, Perth, Australia
April 3rd, 2017
http://www.snow-workshop.org


Call for papers:
The workshop provides a venue for presenting novel ideas and discussing future directions in the emerging areas of news sourcing, verification, search, mining, and recommendation.
It especially focuses on the interplay between news content, generated by professional journalists, and social media content, generated by millions of users in real-time and subject to social media dynamics.

We also invite contributions on modeling and leveraging user feedback related to news content, as well as contributions on mining news comments.
Furthermore, we invite contributions on the multi-disciplinary topics of citizen journalism, news ethics and computational (or data-driven) journalism.
The former studies how citizens can collaborate to collect information, synthesize, edit, verify, and produce their own news stories following a crowdsourcing paradigm.
The second looks into ethical issues arising from deploying algorithmic decision making in news recommendation and mining.
The latter investigates the use of analysis of web data by professional journalists as an integral part of the news creation process.

Finally, the workshop will also feature an interactive "face-off" debate on the main topic of the workshop: the interaction between news and social media.
The debate will be conducted in the Oxford style, and will discuss the question "is social media the future of news?"

Topics of interest for SNOW include but are not limited to:
• Bias, accountability and transparency in online and social media news
• Citizen journalism and wiki-news
• Data journalism
• Detection of breaking news and events from social streams
• Detection of hoaxes and news spam
• Filter bubbles in social media
• Framing, agenda setting, and gate keeping in online news and social media
• Geotagging and geographical mining applications related to news
• Information retrieval in news collections
• Mining news comments, sentiment, and opinions
• Modeling of news readers
• Modeling trust and authority of news sources
• Image and video analysis for news applications
• News and mobile computing
• News content verification and fact-checking
• News propagation on social networks
• Personalized news recommendation
• Platforms and services for computational journalism
• Retrieval and mining of multimedia content related to news
• Robot journalism, algorithmic news selection, and legal aspects
• Social media and censorship
• Studying the interplay between news and Web usage data
• Studying the interplay between news and social media data
• Summarization, exploration, and visualization of news
• Tracking of news evolution

The major criterion for the selection of papers will be their potential to generate discussion and influence future research directions.


Deadlines:
• Paper submission: Jan 17, 2017 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
• Acceptance notification: Feb 03, 2017
• Camera-ready version: Feb 14, 2017


Paper submission:
Two different types of contributions will be considered:
• Full research papers (6 pages max)
• Position papers (4 pages max)
In the spirit of the workshop theme, the acceptance of papers will be conditioned to the submission of a blog entry (that will be posted on the workshop website) describing the research carried out in a non-technical style. The purpose is to reach outside the computer-science community and make the latest results on computer-based journalism known to a broader audience.

Papers have to present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Any paper published by the ACM, IEEE, or other organizations, 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.

All submitted papers must:
• be written in English;
• contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
• be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template with a font size no smaller than 9pt;
• be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size;
• occupy no more than 6 pages (4 for position papers), including abstract, references, and appendices.
It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format. Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

Paper submission is single blind and will be handled via EasyChair. We will tentatively invite the best submissions to extend their papers in order to be published on a special issue of a journal.

For any question about the call for papers please contact snow2017@easychair.org


Program Chairs:

Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar
Luca Maria Aiello, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, UK
Symeon Papadopoulos, CERTH-ITI, Thessaloniki, Greece
Haewoon Kwak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar