Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search (SoAPS 2018)
In conjunction with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018)
Grenoble France - March 26, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS
In order to improve the web experience of the users, classic personalization technologies (e.g., recommender systems) and search engines usually rely on static schemes. Indeed, users are allowed to express ratings in a fixed range of values for a given catalogue of products, or to express a query that usually returns the same set of webpages/products for all the users.
With the advent of communication systems (social media platforms, instant messaging systems, speech recognition and transcription tools, etc.), users have been allowed to create new content and to express opinions and preferences in new forms (e.g., likes, textual comments, and audio feedbacks). Moreover, the social interactions can provide information on who influences whom. Being able to mine usage and collaboration patterns that arise thanks to social aspects and to analyze the collective cooperations, opens new frontiers in the generation of personalization services and in the improvement of search engines. Moreover, recent technological advances, such as deep learning, are able to provide a context to the analyzed data (e.g., word embeddings provide a vector representation of the words in a corpus, considering the context in which a word has been used).
Our workshop will solicit contributions in all topics related to employing social aspects for personalization and search purposes, focused (but not limited) to the following list:
- Recommender systems
- Search and tagging
- Query expansion
- User modeling and profiling
- Advertising and ad targeting
- Content classification, categorization, and clustering
- Using social network features/community detection algorithms for personalization and search purposes
- Employing speech transcription in personalization and search
- Building benchmarking datasets
- Novel evaluation methodologies in the social context

IMPORTANT DATES
- Paper submission: January 29, 2018
- Notification of acceptance: February 15, 2018
- Camera-ready version: February 28, 2018
- Workshop date: March 26, 2018

TYPES OF CONTRIBUTIONS
We will consider three different submission types, all in the LNCS format: regular (14 pages), short (8 pages) and extended abstracts (4 pages).

- Research and position papers (regular or short) should be clearly placed with respect to the state of the art and state the contribution of the proposal in the domain of application, even if presenting preliminary results. In particular, research papers should describe the methodology in detail, experiments should be repeatable, and a comparison with the existing approaches in the literature should be made where possible.
- Position papers (short) should introduce novel point of views in the workshop topics or summarize the experience of a researcher or a group in the field.
- Practice and experience reports (short) should present in detail the real-world scenarios in which social aspects are employed for personalization and search purposes.
- Demo proposals (extended abstract) should present the details of a prototype or complete application that employs social aspects for personalization and search purposes. The systems will be demonstrated to the workshop attendees.

The reviewing process will be coordinated by the organizers. Each paper will receive three reviews: two externals to the organizing committee and one internal. The external reviewers will be contacted according to their expertise in the paper topic.

PROCEEDINGS
All accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website together with the material generated during the meeting.
The SoAPS 2018 Workshop proceedings will also be available in a volume (whose details will be given soon), and indexed on DBLP and Scopus.
Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version in a journal special issue.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submission must be written in English and follow the ECIR paper guidelines. All papers must be formatted according to the LNCS format style.

Papers should be submitted in PDF format, electronically, using the EasyChair submission system, available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecir2018 (please, select track "Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search" when creating a new submission).

INVITED SPEAKER
TBA

CONTACTS
Website: http://soaps.di.uniroma1.it/
For general enquires regarding the workshop, send an email to both the organizers at ludovico.boratto@acm.org, stilo@di.uniroma1.it

ORGANIZERS
Ludovico Boratto (EURECAT, Spain)
Giovanni Stilo (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)