CfP: 6th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2016) at WWW 2016

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    the 6th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2016)

at WWW 2016


http://microposts2016.seas.upenn.edu


11/12th Apr 2016


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THEME: Big things come in small packages

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Microposts – "information published on the Web that is small in size and
requires minimal effort to publish" – remain a popular means for
communicating information. Microposts include tweets (using plain text or
with embedded links and objects); social network endorsement using
Instagram hearts; check-ins via Facebook and Foursquare, pins on Pinterest;
links to brief, pre-recorded and streaming video via Snapchat and Meerkat.
Microblogging apps for the ubiquitous smartphone and other small, personal
devices, which support capturing photos and short videos, allow these to
accompany text or serve in themselves as the Micropost. Services such as
those provided by WhatsApp, Viber, Snapchat, LINE and Saya, piggybacking on
SMS/MMS and augmented with social media features, are also growing in
popularity, especially in emerging markets where the Internet is often
accessible mainly via mobile networks. Such services typically sync with
desktop or web front-ends, allowing seamless switching between devices.
Microposts are also used as a portal to other services, alerting users to,
e.g., live video streams on Periscope and Meerkat.


Individual Microposts typically focus on a single thought, message or
theme, often written on the go or in the moment, as events transpire.
Collectively, however, Microposts  comprise a very large amount of
heterogeneous data – a source of valued, collective intelligence about a
range of topics that may be mined for a variety of end uses, including
opinion mining and crowd tracking, emergency response and community
services. The #Microposts workshops aim to continue to provide a forum to
enable discussion and hence, improve understanding of the social and
cultural phenomena that influence the publication and reuse of Microposts;
to assess different approaches to gleaning the information content.
Enabling the understanding and application of Microposts in various
contexts requires techniques and tools that function at scale, and that are
able to handle the very high rate of publication.


Despite advances in tools to tackle the specific challenges inherent to
Micropost data, applications and approaches for analysing Microposts still
rely on third party text extraction tools. An important aim of the workshop
is to promote formal evaluation of the accuracy of text extraction tools
specifically for Micropost data, as opposed to more typical comparative
assessment using corpora of well-formed, normal length, natural language
documents. To address this issue, starting in 2013 the workshop hosted an
information extraction challenge in which participants detected named
entities typed with corresponding concepts. In 2014, the challenge was
extended to require also the linking of entities extracted to relevant
DBpedia sources. 2015 saw further extension that tested the accuracy and
runtime efficiency of entrants' systems for entity extraction and linking.
#Microposts2016 will consolidate the 2015 task and provide a base from
which participants will deploy live systems. Evolution of the challenge
each year addresses a current need of researchers and others who rely on
the output of text extraction tools specifically built to support or
adapted to Micropost data, and where reliability and computation time are
important when dealing with large-scale datasets.




TOPICS OF INTEREST

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#Microposts2016 will focus on topics including, but not exclusive to, the
three areas below:


    MAKING SENSE/UNDERSTAND – focusing on the human in Micropost data
generation and analysis, we encourage submissions that look at
understanding how situation and context drive individual and collective
generation of Microposts, whether targeted at the general public, a
specific person or other entity, e.g. a ruling government or a cause. We
particularly encourage interdisciplinary work and that driven by research
in Social & Computational Science and Information and Web Sciences, that
lead to deeper understanding of Micropost content, and how this content
influences the contribution of Micropost data to, among others:

- Collective awareness

- Education & citizen empowerment, data & citizen journalism

- Civil action, media & politics

- Political and polemical aspects of Microposts

- Ethics, legal and privacy issues

- Psychological profiling and psychological aspects of Micropost-based
interaction

- Cultural, generational and regional differences in access and use of
Microposts

- Humans as sensors

- Impact of effortless posting and wearable devices on communication


    DISCOVER – The extraction of information content from Microposts and
subsequent analysis contribute to the discovery of patterns and trends in
the data. This information is key to further knowledge discovery and
application, using a number of approaches including:

- Emergent semantics

- Data mining from Microposts

- Opinion mining, sentiment and sentic analysis

- Network analysis and community detection

- Influence detection and social contagion modelling

- Prediction approaches

- Linking Microposts into the Web of Linked Data (i.e. entity extraction
and URI disambiguation)


    APPLY – Applications papers and case studies describing systems that
make use of Micropost data. This includes tools developed to support the
generation and sharing of Microposts using a variety of devices and media,
piggybacking where necessary on other communication methods, including
SMS/MMS and even radio. Areas of interest include:

- Collective intelligence, user profiling, personalisation & recommendation

- Business analytics & market intelligence with particular attention to big
data

- Event & topic detection and tendency tracking

- Microposts as a second screen to television, large screens and stages at
public events

- Geo-localised, Micropost-based services

- Public consensus & citizen participation

- Security, emergency response & health

- Linking social and physical signals for, e.g., crowd tracking

- Identification and use of geo-location information embedded in or
attached to Microposts

- Increasing importance of multilingual and non-English Microposts





#Microposts2016 BEST PAPER AWARD

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Best paper award for main track will be sponsored by the

    MK:Smart project (http://www.mksmart.org)


Award: £500

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(COMPUTATIONAL) SOCIAL SCIENCES TRACK

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To foster collaboration between Computer Science and (Computational) Social
Science, and continue to encourage contribution from the latter domain to
improve on 'Making Sense of Microposts', we will include again a special
track dedicated to Social Science papers and other related fields. The best
paper award for this track will for the second time be sponsored by GESIS,
Germany, with an award of €300.

This track will be chaired by Katrin Weller (GESIS, Germany). Further
detail will be sent out in a separate call for papers.


Web page: http://microposts2016.seas.upenn.edu/socsci_track.html






NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION AND LINKING CHALLENGE

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Held since 2013, each year the challenge has allowed a valuable overview of
the state of the art and has received expressions of interest and
submissions from both industry and academia. We have also seen continued
interest after publication of the results each year. We expect this to
continue in 2016 with further extension of the challenge and with the
provision of a base for the deployment of live systems. In line with the
overall workshop goals, we envisage that the outcomes of the challenge will
continue to advance work in the domains of named entity recognition and
disambiguation, with a specific focus on function over the short length
information snippets in Microposts. A detailed description of the challenge
will be published in a separate call, with intent to participate to be
registered in Jan 2016.


Web page: http://microposts2016.seas.upenn.edu/challenge.html





WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

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We aim to start with a keynote address, followed by regular paper
presentations and brief overviews of selected submissions to the Challenge.
We will hold a poster and demo session to trigger further, in-depth
interaction between workshop participants. The workshop will close with the
presentation of awards.





SUBMISSIONS

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   Full papers: 8 pages

   Short and position papers: 4 pages

   Demos & Posters: 3 & 2 pages resp.

   Social Sciences track: 6 pages (full); 3 pages (short)

   Challenge extended abstracts: 3 pages (with challenge results)


All written submissions should be prepared according to the ACM SIG
Proceedings Template (see
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates), should include
author names and affiliations, and 3-5 author-selected keywords. Where a
submission includes additional material submission this should be made as a
single, unencrypted zip file that includes a plain text file listing its
contents.


Submission is via EasyChair, at:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=microposts2016



Each submission will receive, in addition to a meta-review, at least 2 peer
reviews, with full papers at least 3 peer reviews.



We aim to publish the #Microposts2016 proceedings as a single volume
containing all three tracks, via CEUR. The same publication conditions
however apply as for other workshop proceedings included in the WWW
conference companion:

"Any paper published by the ACM, IEEE, etc. which can be properly cited
constitutes research which must be considered in judging the novelty of a
WWW submission, whether the published paper was in a conference, journal,
or workshop. Therefore, any paper previously published as part of a WWW
workshop must be referenced and suitably extended with new content to
qualify as a new submission to the Research Track at the WWW conference."


Note this caveat does not apply to extended abstracts submitted to the
special Social Sciences track summarising or discussing previously
published work or presenting position statements.





IMPORTANT DATES

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Main Track submission deadline:  *13 Jan 2016*

Social Sciences Track submission deadline: *13 Jan 2016*


Notification: 05 Feb 2016

Camera-ready (hard) deadline (Main & Social Sciences tracks): 10 Feb 2016


NEEL Challenge - Test set release: *31 Jan 2016*

                - Submission deadline: *07 Feb 2016*



(all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time)


Workshop - 11/12 Apr 2016 (registration open to all)






CONTACT

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E-mail: microposts2016@easychair.org


Twitter persona: @Microposts2016

Twitter hashtag: #Microposts2016


W3C Microposts Community Group: http://www.w3.org/community/microposts



ORGANISERS

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A. Elizabeth Cano, KMi, The Open University, UK

Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Danica Radovanović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Aba-Sah Dadzie, KMi, The Open University, UK




ADVISORY COMMITTEE & PUBLICITY

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Milan Stankovic, Sépage & STIH / Université Paris-Sorbonne, France




Program Committee

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Nikolaos Aletras, Amazon, UK

Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy

Julie Birkholz, CHEGG, Universiteit Gent, Belgium

Marco A. Casanova, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil

Óscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Guillaume Erétéo, Vigiglobe, France

Miriam Fernandez, KMi, The Open University, UK

Lucie Flekova, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Anna Lisa Gentile, University of Sheffield, UK

Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Jelena Jovanovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Mathieu Lacage, Alcméon, France

Maria Liakata, Warwick University, UK

Vasileios Lampos, University College London, UK

Yelena Mejova, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

José M. Morales del Castillo, El Colegio de México, Mexico

Fabrizio Orlandi, University of Bonn, Germany

Bernardo Pereira Nunes, PUC-Rio, Brazil

Harald Sack, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany

Bernhard Schandl, mySugr GmbH, Austria

Victoria Uren, Aston Business School, UK

Andrea Varga, The University of Sheffield, UK

Svitlana Volkova, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Alistair Willis, The Open University, UK

Wei Xu, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Ziqi Zhang, University of Sheffield, UK




(COMPUTATIONAL) SOCIAL SCIENCES TRACK

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CHAIR:

Katrin Weller, GESIS, Germany


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BEST PAPER AWARD: sponsored by GESIS, Germany ( http://www.gesis.org )


Award: €300 to highest ranking submission

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Program Committee

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Gholam R. Amin, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

Julie Birkholz, CHEGG, Universiteit Gent, Belgium

Jordan Carpenter, University of Pennsylvania, USA

A. Seza Doğruöz, Tilburg University, Netherlands

Fabio Giglietto, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy

Athina Karatzogianni, University of Leicester, UK

José M. Morales del Castillo, El Colegio de México, Mexico

Raquel Recuero, Universidade Católica de Pelotas, Brazil

Luca Rossi, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy

Victoria Uren, Aston Business School, UK

Alistair Willis, The Open University, UK




CHALLENGE EVALUATION COMMITTEE:

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CHAIRS:

Giuseppe Rizzo, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy

Marieke van Erp, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands


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BEST SUBMISSION AWARD: sponsored by FREME ( http://www.freme-project.eu )


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Program Committee

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Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada

Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy

David Corney, Signal Media, UK

Grégoire Burel, KMi, Open University, UK

Milan Dojchinovski, Leipzig University, Germany / ​CTU in Prague, Czech
Republic

Guillaume Erétéo, Vigiglobe, France

Anna Lisa Gentile, The University of Sheffield, UK

José M. Morales del Castillo, El Colegio de México, Mexico

Bernardo Pereira Nunes, PUC-Rio, Brazil

Giles Reger, The University of Manchester, UK

Irina Temnikova, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

Victoria Uren, Aston University, UK




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ADDITIONAL WORKSHOP SPONSORS:


WWBP - the World Well-Being Project (http://wwbp.org)

EDSA - the European Data Science Academy (http://edsa-project.eu)

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