Information Retrieval Journal (Springer)
Special Issue on “Social Media for Personalization and Search”


CALL FOR PAPERS
Social media platforms have become powerful tools to collect the preferences of the users and get to know them more. In order to build profiles about what the users like or dislike, a system does not only have to rely on explicitly given preferences (e.g., ratings) or on implicitly collected data (e.g., from the browsing sessions). In the middle, there lie opinions and preferences expressed through likes, textual comments, click/view logs, following preferences, digital conversations, and posted content. Moreover, the social network itself can provide information on who influences whom.

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. 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.

Being able to mine usage and collaboration patterns in social media and to analyze the content generated by the users 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., Google's word2vec provides a vector representation of the words in a corpus, considering the context in which a word has been used).
This special issue solicits novel papers that exploit social media on a broad range of topics, including, but not limited to:
- 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
- Event/topic detection over heterogeneous social sources


IMPORTANT DATES
- First submission paper due: October 30, 2017
- First round decision made: December 30, 2017
- Revised manuscript due: February 28, 2018
- Final decision made: April 30, 2018
- Final paper due: May 31, 2018


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Paper submissions must conform to the Information Retrieval Journal format guidelines (http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retrieval/journal/10791).

Manuscripts must be submitted to the online submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/inrt/). Please, select option "S.I. : Social Media for Personalization and Search" in the article type.

Submissions to this Special Issue must represent original material that has been neither submitted to, nor published in, any other journal. A submission based on one or more papers that appeared elsewhere should have at least 30% of novel valuable content that extends the original work (the original papers should be referenced and the novel contributions should be clearly stated in the submitted paper).


CONTACTS
Website: http://somepeas.di.uniroma1.it/somepeas-si2018.html
For enquiries regarding the special issue, send an email to all the guest editors at ludovico.boratto@acm.org, stilo@di.uniroma1.it, kaltenbrunner@gmail.com.


GUEST EDITORS
Ludovico Boratto - EURECAT (Spain)
Andreas Kaltenbrunner - EURECAT (Spain)
Giovanni Stilo - Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)