Language Engineering for Online Reputation Management

=== Call for Papers ===

** deadline: 15 February 2012 **

Online Reputation Management deals with the image that online media project about individuals and organizations.  The growing relevance of social media and the speed at which facts and opinions travel in microblogging networks make online reputation an essential part of a company's public relations.

While traditional reputation analysis was based mostly on manual analysis (clipping from media, surveys, etc.), the key value from online media comes from the ability to process, understand and aggregate potentially very large streams of facts and opinions about a company or individual. Information to be mined includes answers to questions such as: What is the general state of opinion about a company/individual in online media?  What are its perceived strengths and weaknesses, as compared to its peers/competitors?  How is the company positioned with respect to its strategic market?  Can incoming threats to its reputation be detected early enough to be neutralized before they effectively affect reputation?

In this context, Natural Language Processing plays a key enabling role, and we are already witnessing an unprecedented demand for text mining software in this area.  While the area of opinion mining has made significant advances in the recent years, most tangible progress has been focused on products.  However, mining and understanding opinions about companies and individuals is, in general, a much harder and less understood problem.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together the Language Engineering community (including researchers and developers) with representatives from the Online Reputation Management industry, with the ultimate goal of establishing a five-year roadmap on the topic, and a description of the language technologies required to get there in terms of resources, algorithms and applications.

With this purpose in mind, the workshop will welcome both research papers and position statements from industry and academia.  The agenda for the event will include both presentations (from accepted submissions and selected invited speakers) and a collaborative discussion to determine a roadmap for Language Engineering in Online Reputation Management.  The EU project LiMoSINe (starting November 2011) will be used as a funding instrument to ensure that participation is representative and key players are engaged in the workshop.

We welcome position statements and short papers on any topic relevant to the workshop topic, including (but not limited to):

- Topic detection and tracking
- Trend detection and prediction
- Opinion mining and sentiment analysis; negation and modality detection.
- Entity-oriented search and mining: entity ranking, entity profiling, name
  disambiguation, etc.
- Language processing for user-generated content, micro-text understanding,
  and social media analysis.
- Real time language processing

Position statements should include contact details and a short (one page) description of the author's take on the (primarily technical) challenges to be faced in the Online Reputation Management field in the next five years.

Short papers should have a maximum length of four pages, identify the authors (reviewing will not be blind) and may describe work in progress. Papers that include a comparative assessment of current commercial applications and/or research prototypes are particularly welcome.

Submissions should be uploaded here:

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Reputation2012/

Important dates:

15 February: Deadline for position statements and short papers

15 March: Acceptance notifications

1 April: Camera-ready versions

26 May: Workshop at LREC 2012

Workshop Organizers:

Adolfo Corujo (Llorente & Cuenca, Spain)
http://llorenteycuenca.com

Julio Gonzalo (UNED, Spain)
http://nlp.uned.es/~julio

Edgar Meij (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
http://edgar.meij.pro

Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~mdr/