[Rstlist] Call for Papers: Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on Language in Social Media

Thu Apr 27 16:39:14 UTC 2017

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the journal Computational 
Linguisticson Language in Social Media

** Apologies for cross-posting **

========================================

Special Issue of the journal Computational Linguistics on:

Language in Social Media: Exploiting discourse and other contextual 
information

*** Deadline 15th October 2017 (11:59 pm PST) ***

For more details see: http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/coli-si.html

========================================

**Guest editors**

Farah Benamara - IRIT, Toulouse University (benamara at irit.fr)

Diana Inkpen - University of Ottawa  (diana.inkpen at uottawa.ca)

Maite Taboada - Simon Fraser University (mtaboada at sfu.ca)

**Contact**

socialmedia.coli AT gmail.com

**Call for papers**

Social media content (SMC) is changing the way people interact with each 
other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about 
situations, objects and past experiences. This content (ranging from 
blogs, fora, reviews, and various social networking sites) has specific 
characteristics that are often referred as the five V's: volume, 
variety, velocity, veracity, and value. Most of them are short online 
conversational posts or comments often accompanied by non-linguistic 
contextual information, including metadata such as the social network of 
each user and their interactions with other users. Exploiting the 
context of a word or a sentence increases the amount of information we 
can get from it and enables novel applications. Such rich contextual 
information, however, makes natural language processing (NLP) of SMC a 
challenging research task. Indeed, simply applying traditional text 
mining tools is clearly sub-optimal, as such methods take into account 
neither the interactive dimension nor the particular nature of this 
data, which shares properties of both spoken and written language.

Most research on NLP for social media focuses primarily on content-based 
processing of the linguistic information, using lexical semantics (e.g., 
discovering new word senses or multiword expressions) or semantic 
analysis (opinion extraction, irony detection, event and topic 
detection, geo-location detection) (Londhe et al., 2016; Aiello et al., 
2013; Inkpen et al., 2015; Ghosh et al., 2015). Other research explores 
the interactions between content and extra-linguistic or extra-textual 
features like time, place, author profiles, demographic information, 
conversation thread and network structure, showing that combining 
linguistic data with network and/or user context improves performance 
over a baseline that uses only textual information (West et al., 2014; 
Karoui et al., 2015; Volkova et al., 2014; Ren et al., 2016).

We expect that papers in this special issue will contribute to a deeper 
understanding of these interactions from a new perspective of discourse 
interpretation. We believe that we are entering a new age of mining 
social media data, one that extracts information not just from 
individual words, phrases and tags, but also uses information from 
discourse and the wider context. Most of the “big data” revolution in 
social media analysis has examined words in isolation, a “bag-of-words” 
approach. We believe it is possible to investigate big data, and social 
media data in general, by exploiting contextual information.

We encourage submission of papers that address deep issues in 
linguistics, computational linguistics and social science. In 
particular, our focus is on the exploitation of contextual information 
within the text (discourse, argumentation chains) and extra-linguistic 
information (social network, demographic information, geo-location) to 
improve NLP applications and help building pragmatic-based NLP systems. 
The special issue aims also to bring researchers that propose new 
solutions for processing SMC  in various use-cases including sentiment 
analysis, detection of offensive content, and intention detection. These 
solutions need to be reliable enough in order to prove their 
effectiveness against shallow bag-of-words approaches or content-based 
approaches alone.

**Topics of interest**

We are particularly interested in submissions that address the topics 
below, by leveraging the role of discourse and/or other contextual 
information. We believe there are novel and interesting approaches that 
can be developed over the next few years.

  *

    Lexical semantic resources, corpora and annotations of semantic and
    pragmatic phenomena in social media.

  *

    The role of extra-linguistic information in improving content-based
    social media applications.

  *

    Figurative language detection (metaphor, irony, sarcasm).

  *

    Discourse processing and argumentation mining of social media texts.

  *

    Pragmatic phenomena in computational social linguistics.

  *

    Intention detection (e.g., intention to purchase a product, or vote
    for a particular candidate, but also other behaviours such as suicide).

  *

    Detection of offensive and abusive language.

  *

    Fake news detection. Tracking rumours.

We also welcome contributions and comparisons on already studied topics 
like the following, but submissions need to highlight the role of 
discourse and/or other  contextual phenomena:

  *

    Social structure and position analysis using microblog content;

  *

    Sentiment/opinion retrieval, extraction and classification

  *

    Tracking and summarization of opinion

  *

    Emotion detection.

**Paper format and reviewing policy**

Papers should be submitted according to the Computational Linguistics 
style:http://cljournal.org/

Send papers using the online submission system: 
http://cljournal.org/submissions.html. In Step 1 of the submission 
process, please select 'Special Issue: Language in Social Media' under 
the 'Journal Section' heading.

Please note that papers submitted to a special issue undergo the same 
reviewing process as regular papers. Special issues are the same length 
as regular issues (at most 5-6 papers) 
http://cljournal.org/specialissues.html.

**Deadline**

Paper submission deadline: October 15, 2017 (11:59 pm PST)

**References**

See http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/coli-si.html 
<http://www.sfu.ca/%7Emtaboada/coli-si.html>

-- 
Maite Taboada
Professor
Department of Linguistics
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Dr.
Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

Tel +1-778-782-5585
mtaboada at sfu.ca
http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada  

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