[Corpora-List] TAL special issue

Mon Mar 1 08:51:12 UTC 2010

Dear list members,
Please see below a Call for Papers for a special issue of TAL covering opinions, sentiment and subjectivity. Papers may be submitted in English or in French. With apologies for cross-postings.

Call for papers
Special edition of TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues)
Opinions, sentiment and subjectivity
Deadline for submissions: 31 May 2010
Guest editors: Agata Jackiewicz (STIH, Université de Paris-Sorbonne), Susan Hunston (University of Birmingham) and Marc El-Beze (LIA, Université D'Avignon)
Background
In recent years there has been a growing interest in research about opinions, attitudes, sentiment and emotions expressed in written texts, involving for example on-line editions of print-based newspapers and newer media such as blogs or e-forums. A new field of research is rapidly establishing itself in a number of areas, pursuing a range of objectives and including the study of opinions about a variety of entities (products, behaviours and so on) based on methods and techniques that are equally diverse. Evidence for this increase in interest includes the establishment of a number of research groups and the recent opinion mining exercises FODDP '08, DEFT '07, DEFT '09, CTNIR6.
The study of opinions, attitudes and sentiment involves a diverse range of variables: the object of opinion, the source of opinion (made complex by the presence of attribution and dialogue), the strength and polarity of the opinion, whether it is expressed overtly or covertly, the degree of alignment in opinion between the text producer and the receiver. It is known that the expression of opinion is complex and can be fine-grained. As a result, attempts to focus only on the simple assignment of polarity to a whole document lead to results which are exploitable only in relatively restricted cases.
Alongside this variation goes a variety of research approaches, including the automation of sentiment identification and analysis, the investigation of stance in conversation and in written text, the modelling of evaluative language in Appraisal theory (J. Martin and P. White 2005 The Language of Evaluation), and the use of corpus-driven lexical studies to identify evaluative prosodies. To these might be added studies of evidentiality, metadiscourse, point of view, rhetoric, persuasion and argumentation, and philosophical approaches to the activity of evaluation.
There is an increasing amount of data available to researchers. For example, on many websites, visitors are invited to write or say what they think of a product, an object, an idea or a person. There are no constraints on the kind of language that can be used, and the extreme variability of forms which express subjective points of view is such that they are particularly difficult to detect automatically. There is no agreed approach that would process this data and make it of benefit to the user.
In view of the wide variety of work that has been undertaken from a range of disciplines, and the need to achieve more applicable results, a review and proposals for future work is timely. It needs to be undertaken from at least four points of view:  (1) a modelling of how knowledge comes about (what is an 'opinion', how can it be represented?); (2) expression in language and discourse (how are opinions, in their various guises, formulated?); (3) the methods needed to achieve an automatic analysis of written and recorded texts and (4) how a diversity of opinions can be identified and represented.
Objectives and themes
The aim of the special issue of TAL is to summarise and comment on recent progress on the analysis of opinions, sentiments and evaluation.
This call for papers is directed towards information scientists, linguists, and argumentation specialists. We hope for as broad a range of viewpoints, methodologies and approaches as possible.
We wish to publish both innovative papers and those which synthesise previous work and look to the future on themes including the following (indicative list only):

 *   Modelling opinions using linguistics and information science:
    *   The definition, categorisation and formalisation of ideas about opinion, evaluation, and sentiment (linguistic models, ontologies etc);
    *   The characterisation of different parameters used to classify opinions (object of evaluation - source - context - type of attitude);
    *   Quantitative and symbolic approaches.
 *   The construction, acquisition and validation of linguistics resources (lexical, grammatical, phraseological) for the expression of opinions.
 *   The characterisation, annotation and automatic extraction of opinions in written and audiovisual texts.
 *   The representation of opinion-bearing discourse:
    *   The identification of text segments involving opinions characterised by a number of criteria (semantic value, source, strength, focus, type of entity being evaluated etc);
    *   The representation of the development of opinions and the change of opinions over time.
 *   The study and treatment of opinions in commercial contexts:
    *   The analysis of opinions in specialised domains;
    *   Responses to real-world needs.

(Provisional) editorial panel
Nicholas Asher, IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse
Monika Bednarek, University of Sidney
Farah Benamara Zitoune, IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse
Yves Bestgen, CECL, Université catholique de Louvain
Thierry Charnois, GREYC, Université de Caen
Chloé Clavel, EDF, Paris
Marc El-Bèze, LIA, Université d'Avignon
Stéphane Ferrari, GREYC, Université de Caen
Catherine Gouttas, Thales
Susan Huston, University of Birmingham
Agata Jackiewicz, STIH,Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Philippe Laublet, STIH, Université Paris-Sorbonne
Mark Lee, University of Birmingham
Dominique Legallois, CRISCO, Université de Caen
Marie-Francine Moens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Laura Monceaux, LINA, Université de Nantes
Renato De Mori, LIA, Université d'Avignon
Maria Teresa Pazienza, Université de Rome Tor Vergata
Mathieu Roche, LIRMM, Université de Montpellier 2
Horacio Rodriguez , Université Polytechnique de Catalogne, Barcelone
Horacio Saggion, University of Sheffield
Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool
Juan Manuel Torres-Moreno, LIA, Université d'Avignon
To be confirmed: Janet Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh

Format
Articles should be submitted in Word or LaTeX. Instructions to authors and the stylesheet can be found at this address: http://www.atala.org/Instructions-aux-auteurs-feuilles and http://tal.e-revues.com/appel.jsp
Language
Articles may be submitted in French or in English. Articles in English will be accepted only from non-francophone authors.
Important dates
31.05.2010:     Deadline for submission
15.09.2010:     Editors' decision
01/11/2010:     Deadline for revised versions
Publication is expected by the beginning of 2011.

Article submission
Articles (20 to 25 pages maximum when in pdf format) should be sent electronically to these addresses: s.e.hunston at bham.ac.uk<mailto:s.e.hunston at bham.ac.uk>; Agata.Jackiewicz at paris-sorbonne.fr<mailto:Agata.Jackiewicz at paris-sorbonne.fr>; and marc.elbeze at univ-avignon.fr<mailto:marc.elbeze at univ-avignon.fr>

Prof Susan Hunston
School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
Tel: +44 (0)121 414 5675
Email: s.e.hunston at bham.ac.uk

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