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7th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
(WASSA 2016) -
http://optima.jrc.it/wassa2016/

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16th June 2016, San Diego, California, U.S.A.

*held in conjunction to NAACL-HLT 2016*

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BACKGROUND
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Research in automatic Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (SSA), as subtasks of Affective Computing and Natural Language Processing (NLP), has flourished in the past years. The growth in interest in these tasks was motivated by the birth and rapid expansion of the Social Web that made it possible for people all over the world to share, comment or consult content on any given topic. In this context, opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in Social Media texts have been shown to have a high influence on the social and economic behaviour worldwide. SSA systems are highly relevant to many real-world applications (e.g. marketing, eGovernance, business intelligent, social analysis) and also many tasks in NLP – information extraction, question answering, textual entailment, to name just a few.
The importance of this field has been proven by the high number of approaches proposed in research in the past decade, as well as by the interest that it raised from other disciplines (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Marketing, Crisis Management, Behavioral Studies) and the applications that were created using its technology.
In spite of the growing body of research in the area in the past years, dealing with affective phenomena in text has proven to be a complex, interdisciplinary problem that remains far from being solved. Its challenges include the need to address the issue from different perspectives and at different levels, depending on the characteristics of the textual genre, the language(s) treated and the final application for which the analysis is done. Additionally, SSA from Social Media texts has opened the way to many other types of analyses, linking textual data with images, social network metadata and the specific text markings (e.g. Twitter hashtags) and giving the unprecedented possibility to follow events unfolding through Twitter messages or Facebook posts.
Finally, the possibility to follow trends on opinions, while comparing and contrasting different sources of information (e.g. mainstream media vs. social media) allows for a balanced, unbiased, more complete view and fairer opinion formation process from the wide public.
ENVISAGED SCOPE OF WASSA 2016
The aim of the 7th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2016) is to continue the line of the previous editions, bringing together researchers in Computational Linguistics working on Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis and researchers working on interdisciplinary aspects of affect computation from text. Additionally, starting with WASSA 2013, we extended the focus to Social Media phenomena and the impact of affect-related phenomena in this context. In this new proposed edition, we would like to encourage the submission of long and short research and demo papers including, but not restricted to the following topics related to subjectivity and sentiment analysis:

• Resources for subjectivity, sentiment and social media analysis; (semi-)automatic corpora generation and annotation
• Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, aggregation and summarization
• Trend detection in social media using subjectivity and sentiment analysis techniques
• Data linking through social networks based on affect-related NLP methods
• Impact of affective data from social media
• Mass opinion estimation based on NLP and statistical models
• Online reputation management
• Topic and sentiment studies and applications of topic-sentiment analysis
• Domain, topic and genre dependency of sentiment analysis
• Ambiguity issues and word sense disambiguation of subjective language
• Pragmatic analysis of the opinion mining task
• Use of Semantic Web technologies for subjectivity and sentiment analysis
• Improvement of NLP tasks using subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis
• Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations subjectivity and sentiment analysis
• Subjectivity, sentiment and emotion detection in social networks
• Classification of stance in dialogues
• Applications of sentiment and social media analysis systems
• Application of theories from other related fields (Neuropsychology, Cognitive Science, Psychology) to subjectivity and sentiment analysis
In addition, in the light of the fact that different sentiment analysis systems have been proposed and showcased in the past years, we feel there is a growing need to make users familiar with these systems and have them employed for building an end application. To this aim, we would like to organize a “Hackathon” (please see details below).


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SENTIMENT ANALYSIS SYSTEMS HACKATHON

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In the light of the fact that different sentiment analysis systems have been proposed and showcased in the past years, we feel there is a growing need to make other researchers and users familiar with these systems and have them employ them for building an end application.
The Hackathon word stands for “Hacking Marathon”, and its purpose is to introduce some technology or software toolkit to the attendees, and let then “play” and develop ideas around it.
We envisage providing the systems with technology to access the Europe Media Monitor news clusters , which are updated every 10 minutes and access to Twitter and Facebook data through applications that employ the Twitter and Facebook APIs. Subsequently, the sentiment analysis systems participating in the hackathon will process these data for the different applications envisaged by the users.
Several groups and projects have already agreed to a possible participation (in case the workshop is accepted as such) to a hackathon. One of them is the sentiment analysis system developed within the OpeNER project: http://www.opener-project.org/2013/07/18/opener-hackathon-in-amsterdam/ . Other participants that have agreed to take part in the hackathon are the creators of high ranking systems in the recent sentiment analysis competitions (SemEval 2013 Task 2 and TASS 2013). However, the activity will be open to all the people who will sign up for the workshop.
We plan to organize a one day session, in the first half presenting the participating systems and their use and creating teams for “application” development and leaving the second half of the day for working on the systems and presenting the results. We plan to give the participants the possibility to vote on the best application created and reward the winner with a gadget.


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ORGANIZERS

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Alexandra Balahur
European Commission Joint Research Centre
Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC)
Global Security and Crisis Management Unit (GlobeSec)
Europe Media Monitor Team (EMM)
Via E. Fermi 2749, T.P. 267, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy
alexandra.balahur@jrc.ec.europa.eu

Erik van der Goot
European Commission Joint Research Centre
IPSC, GlobeSec, EMM
Via E. Fermi 2749, T.P. 267, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy
Erik.van-der-Goot@jrc.ec.europa.eu

Piek Vossen
Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1105, level 13 (closed flex-working space: call before visit)
1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
piek.vossen@vu.nl

Andrés Montoyo
University of Alicante,
Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos,
Ap. De Correos 99, 03080 Alicante, Spain
montoyo@dlsi.ua.es


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PROGRAM COMMITTEE

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• Nicoletta Calzolari - CNR Pisa, Italy
• Erik Cambria - University of Stirling, U.K.
• Fermin Cruz Mata - University of Seville, Spain
• Montse Cuadros - Vicomtech, Spain
• Leon Derczynski - University of Sheffield, U.K.
• Michael Gamon – Microsoft, U.S.A.
• Veronique Hoste - University of Ghent, Belgium
• Ruben Izquierdo Bevia - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Isa Maks - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Diana Maynard - University of Sheffield, U.K.
• Rada Mihalcea - University of North Texas, U.S.A.
• Saif Mohammad - National Research Council, Canada
• Karo Moilanen - University of Oxford, U.K.
• Günter Neumann - DFKI, Germany
• Constantin Orasan - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
• Viktor Pekar - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
• Jose-Manuel Perea-Ortega – University of Extremadura, Spain
• Maite Martin Valdivia – University of Jaen, Spain
• Paolo Rosso - Technical University of Valencia, Spain
• Bjoern Schueller – Imperial College London, U.K.
• Josef Steinberger - West Bohemia University Prague, The Czech Republic
• Maite Taboada – Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Mike Thelwall - University of Wolverhampton, U.K
• José Antonio Troyano - University of Seville, Spain
• Dan Tufis - RACAI, Romania
• Alfonso Ureña - University of Jaén, Spain
• Marilyn Walker - University of California Santa Cruz, U.S.A.
• Janyce Wiebe - University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
• Michael Wiegand - Saarland University, Germany
• Taras Zagibalov - Brantwatch, U.K.


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IMPORTANT DATES

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• Paper submission deadline: 25 February 2016
• Notification of acceptance: 20 March 2016
• Camera-ready deadline: 30 March 2016
• Workshop to take place at NAACL-HLT 2016: 16 June 2016


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SUBMISSIONS

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We encourage the submission of long, short and demo papers.

Long papers for WASSA 2016 must not exceed eight (8) pages without references. Short papers must not exceed five (5) pages without references. Papers for WASSA should be submitted using the NAACL-HLT 2016 Style Files, available at: http://naacl.org/naacl-hlt-2016/cfp.html

Reviewing for WASSA 2016 will be double 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 should be original, and in particular should not previously have been formally published.

Accepted papers will be published in the NAACL HLT WASSA proceedings, included in the ACL Anthology. The best papers will be chosen for a special issue of an ISI- indexed journal. Previous special issues of WASSA were/are in the process of being published in the Decision Support Systems, Computer Speech and Language and Information Processing and Management journals (Elsevier).
To submit a paper, please access: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2016/WASSA2016/


Looking forward to your contributions!

All the best,
The WASSA 2016 Organizers