Call for Papers

Pre-conference workshop at GSCL Conference 2015

Essen, Germany

September 29, 2015

NLP 4 CMC 2015:

2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer-Mediated Communication / Social Media

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in collecting, processing and analyzing data from genres of social media and computer-mediated communication (CMC): As part of large corpora which have been automatically crawled from the web, CMC data are often regarded as an unloved “bycatch” which is difficult to handle with NLP tools that have been optimized for processing edited text; on the other hand, the existence of CMC data in web corpora is relevant for all research and application contexts which require data sets that represent the full diversity of genres and linguistic variation on the web. For corpus-based variational linguistics, CMC corpora are an important resource for closing the "CMC gap" both in corpora of contemporary written language and in corpora of spoken language: Since CMC and social media make up an important part of contemporary everyday communication, investigations into language change and linguistic variation need to be able to include CMC and social media data into their empirical analyses.

Nevertheless, the development of approaches and tools for processing the linguistic and structural peculiarities of CMC genres and for building CMC corpora is lacking behind the interest of dealing with these types of data in the field of language technology, corpus-based linguistics and web mining.

The goal of the NLP4CMC workshops which are organized by the GSCL special interest group "Social Media / Computer-Mediated Communication" is to provide a platform for the presentation of results and the discussion of ongoing work in adapting NLP tools for processing CMC data and in using NLP solutions for building and annotating social media corpora. The main focus of the workshops is on German data, but submissions on NLP approaches, annotation experiments and CMC corpus projects for data of other European languages are also welcome.

The 1st NLP4CMC workshop was held in September 2014 at KONVENS at the University of Hildesheim. Proceedings of the workshop have been published as part of the KONVENS 2014 workshop proceedings.

The 2nd NLP4CMC workshop will be held in September 2015 at the annual conference of the German Society for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Online proceedings.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

We encourage the submission of long and short research and demo papers including, but not restricted to the following topics related to social media / CMC

    • Corpora and lexical semantic resources for the analysis of social media / computer-mediated communication
    • Normalization (spelling correction, ...)
    • Automatic preprocessing (tokenization, POS tagging, lemmatization, parsing, word sense disambiguation)
    • Annotation of linguistic and structural features in social media / CMC data (annotation schemas, annotation experiments, ...)
    • Domain adaptation
    • Automatic methods in corpus-based CMC / social media analysis (sentiment, summarization, trend detection, ...)
    • Big-data social media analysis

IMPORTANT DATES:

    • Submissions due: 31 July 2015
    • Notification: 31 August 2015
    • Camera-ready papers (revised versions) due: 22 September 2015
    • Workshop: 29 September 2015

SUBMISSIONS:

Submissions should include the names and addresses of all authors and meet the following requirements:

  • Language: German or English
  • Length (2-4 pages)
  • Authors should indicate the intended type (paper, demo, work in progress) and format of their contribution (talk / poster / demonstration)
  • Submissions need to be made in English and should be in PDF format
  • Style sheet for submissions: http://gscl2015.inf.uni-due.de/instructions-for-authors/

Submissions will be accepted via the START system: https://www.softconf.com/e/nlp4cmc2015/