===================================================================== the 6th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2016) at WWW 2016 http://microposts2016.seas.upenn.edu 11/12th Apr 2016 ===================================================================== THEME: Big things come in small packages ------------------- 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 ------------------- #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 -------------------------------------- The best paper award for the main track will be sponsored by the MK:Smart project (http://www.mksmart.org), with an award of £500. (COMPUTATIONAL) SOCIAL SCIENCES TRACK -------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------- 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 ------------ 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 ---------------- Main Track submission deadline: *06 Jan 2016* Social Sciences Track submission deadline: *13 Jan 2016* Notification: 02 Feb 2016 Camera-ready (hard) deadline (Main & Social Sciences tracks): 08 Feb 2016 NEEL Challenge - Release of training set: *from 7 Dec 2015* - Release of dev set: *30 Dec 2015* (all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time) Workshop - 11/12 Apr 2016 (registration open to all) CONTACT ------- E-mail: microposts2016@easychair.org Twitter persona: @Microposts2016 Twitter hashtag: #Microposts2016 W3C Microposts Community Group: http://www.w3.org/community/microposts ORGANISERS ----------- 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 ------------------------------- Milan Stankovic, Sépage & STIH / Université Paris-Sorbonne, France Program Committee ------------------ 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 --------------------------------------- CHAIR: Katrin Weller, GESIS, Germany ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BEST PAPER AWARD: sponsored by GESIS, Germany ( http://www.gesis.org ) Award: €300 to highest ranking submission ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Program Committee ----------------------------------------- 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: -------------------------------- CHAIR: Giuseppe Rizzo, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy Marieke van Erp, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands Program Committee -------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ADDITIONAL WORKSHOP SPONSORS: WWBP - the World Well-Being Project (http://wwbp.org) EDSA - the European Data Science Academy (http://edsa-project.eu) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr Danica Radovanović web site <http://www.danicar.org> | twitter @danicar <http://www.twitter.com/danicar>