International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media

We extended the deadline to September 25th and we added the new information about a forthcoming special issue on the workshop topics: the Information Processing & Management journal (Elsevier, http://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-processing-and-management/) has just accepted to publish a special issue containing extended versions of the best papers at ESSEM 2013 (plus additional papers selected through an open CFP).

For your convenience, the new deadlines are the following:

– September 25th, 2013: Paper submission deadline (extended)
– October 21st, 2013: Notification of acceptance
– October, 31st, 2013: Early registration
– November 4th, 2013: Final manuscripts due
– December 3rd, 2013: Workshop date

 

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

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ESSEM 2013
International Workshop on
Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media:
approaches and perspectives from AI

Turin, Italy, December 3rd, 2013

Submission deadline: September 25th, 2013 (EXTENDED!!!)
Workshop website: http://di.unito.it/essem

Workshop of AI*IA 2013, 25th Year Anniversary, Turin, Italy
XIII Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence

NEWS
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-Deadline extended to *** September 25th 2013 ***.

-We are happy to announce that the Information Processing & Management journal (Elsevier) will publish a special issue containing extended versions of the best papers at ESSEM 2013, plus additional papers selected through an open CFP.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-processing-and-management/

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RATIONALE
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Social and expressive media can represent a challenge and a push forward for research on emotion and sentiment in AI.
Although sentiment analysis and emotion detection have been trending topics since a while, not enough emphasis has been placed so far on social and expressive media. The latter, in particular, play a key role in applicative fields related to creativity, its expressions and outcomes, such as figurative arts, music or drama. In such fields, the advent of digital social media has brought about new paradigms of interactions that foster first-person engagement and crowdsourcing content creation: the subjective and expressive dimensions move to the foreground, opening the way to the emergence of an affective component within a dynamic corpus of contents – created or enriched by users. This calls for delving into the evolution of approaches, techniques and tools for modeling and analyzing emotion and sentiment.

The workshop aims at bridging between the communities of AI researchers working in the field of affective computing under different perspectives. Such perspectives include, on the one hand, research on models and techniques for sentiment analysis and opinion mining on linguistic corpora and unstructured data from social web; on the other hand, research on formal and cognitive models in intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The latter, in particular, is concerned with the integration of emotional states into agents and with the role of emotions in agent communication, with the possible goal of defining sophisticated emotion-aware coordination and negotiation strategies.
Cross-fertilization between different but related communities will be precious in order to face the challenges raised by the social and expressive media, such as:

– extracting concept-level sentiment conveyed by social media texts by relying on structured knowledge of affective information, i.e. affective categorization models expressed by ontologies, better still if psychologically motivated and encoded in the semantic web standards;
– cross-validation between sentiment-based approaches and cognitive models;
– investigating advanced social aspects of emotions, i.e. regulative or ethic issues related to emotions in virtual agents;
– fostering the interoperability and integration of tools by encouraging compliance with emerging standards (e.g. Emotion Markup Language).

TOPICS
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ESSEM aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners both from academy and industry. The workshop wants to take an active part in growing a new field in terms of multi-disciplinary research and identifying and investigating open issues by cross-validating different approaches in emotion research from the AI community. Therefore, we encourage the submission of research papers from different areas such as natural language processing, semantic web, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, affective computing, and others.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

– social media corpora and annotations for subjectivity, emotion & sentiment
– subjectivity, sentiment and emotion detection in social & expressive media
– concept-level sentiment analysis
– biologically inspired opinion mining
– sentiment-based indexing, search and retrieval in social & expressive media
– emotion modeling and ontologies of emotions
– knowledge representation and reasoning about emotions
– semantic web technologies for subjectivity & sentiment analysis
– emotions in virtual agents and multi-agent systems
– social simulation and emotions in cooperative MAS environments
– emotions in face to face interactions
– emotions in multimedia and multimodal systems
– emotions in sounds and music computing
– emotions in interactive entertainment (drama, games, etc.)
– emotions in storytelling
– creative language (humor, irony, etc.) in social & expressive media
– aesthetic perception monitoring in museums (e.g. via wearable sensors)
– emotions in cultural heritage access
– sentiment summarization & visualization
– applications of sentiment analysis on social & expressive media

SPECIAL FOCUS on EMOTIONS in the PLANET ART:
CALL FOR PAPERS & ARTWORKS
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We propose a special focus for ESSEM 2013: emotions and sentiment in fields related to creativity, its expressions and its outcomes, i.e. figurative arts, music, drama, entertainment, etc.
Artistic creation and performance seems to be a very interesting testbed for cross-validating and possibly integrating approaches, models and tools for automatically analyzing and generating emotion and sentiment. In fact, in such context the social and subjective dimension naturally emerges, think for instance to feedback by visitors of a real or virtual art exhibition, or to the audience-oeuvre (or audience-performance) interaction. Moreover, expressive features of the artistic performance can provide an interesting case study for evaluating systems for automatic generation of emotional behaviors.
Our final goal is to encourage the research community to develop models and tools to bring innovation in several application fields (edutainment, healthcare, cultural heritage etc.), in order to give, in the next future, an essential contribution to the development of an inclusive and innovative society.

On this line, we encourage the submission of research papers investigating aspects of emotion and sentiment in fields related to creativity and expressive media.
Moreover, we welcome the submission of artworks, where affective computing is recognized to play a key role in the generation of artistic contents or in the implementation of new forms of interaction to engage the user/audience.
A specific call for artworks and guidelines about the submission of artworks can be found here:
http://www.di.unito.it/~patti/essem13/call4artworks-essem13.pdf.

TIMEFRAME
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– September 25th, 2013: Paper submission deadline (extended)
– October 21st, 2013: Notification of acceptance
– October, 31st, 2013: Early registration
– November 4th, 2013: Final manuscripts due
– December 3rd, 2013: Workshop date

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION
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All papers must represent original and unpublished work that is not currently under review. Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop. We welcome the following types of contributions:

– Full research papers (up to 8-12 pages)
– Short research papers (up to 4-6 pages)
– Demo (system demonstrations) papers (up to 4 pages)
– Position statements (up to 2-4 pages)

All submissions must be written in English and must be formatted according to the information for LNCS Authors:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

Please submit your contributions electronically in PDF format to EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essem2013

PROCEEDINGS & SPECIAL ISSUE
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Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings published on-line by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org), with ISSN.

At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop to present the paper and should then register to the conference with a workshop fee.

The Information Processing & Management journal (Elsevier) will publish a special issue containing extended versions of the best papers at ESSEM 2013, plus additional papers selected through an open CFP.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-processing-and-management/

KEYNOTE: Creative Natural Language Processing
by Carlo Strapparava, FBK-irst, Italy
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Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language has often been considered outside the scope of computational linguistics. Nonetheless it is possible to exploit current NLP techniques starting some explorations about it.
We briefly review some computational experiences about these typical creative genres. Then we will talk about the exploitation of some extra-linguistic features: for example music and lyrics in emotion detection, and an audience-reaction tagged corpus of political speeches for the analysis of persuasive language.
As further examples of practical applications, we will present a system for automatized memory techniques for vocabulary acquisition in a second language, and an application for automatizing creative naming (branding).

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
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Carlo Strapparava is a senior researcher at FBK-irst (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Istituto per la ricerca scientifica e Tecnologica) in the Human Language Technologies Unit. His research activity covers artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, knowledge-based systems, user models, adaptive hypermedia, lexical knowledge bases, word-sense disambiguation, affective computing and computational humour. He is the author of over 150 papers, published in scientific journals, book chapters and in conference proceedings. He also played a key role in the definition and the development of many projects funded by European research programmes. He regularly serves in the program committees of the major NLP conferences (ACL, EMNLP, etc.). He was executive board member of SIGLEX, a Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2007-2010), Senseval (Evaluation Exercises for the Semantic Analysis of Text) organisation committee (2005-2010). On June 2011, he was awarded with a Google Research Award on Natural Language Processing, specifically on the computational treatment of creative language.

PROGRAM CHAIRS AND ORGANIZERS
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Cristina Bosco, University of Torino, Italy
Erik Cambria, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rossana Damiano, University of Torino, Italy
Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Italy
Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Alexandra Balahur, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Italy
Cristina Battaglino, University of Torino, Italy
Andrea Bolioli, CELI, Italy
Antonio Camurri, University of Genova, Italy
Paula Carvalho, INESC-ID & ISLA Campus Lisboa, Portugal
Marc Cavazza, Teesside University, UK
Mário J. Gaspar da Silva, INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, India
Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Andrea Esuli, ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy
Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, Italy
Virginia Francisco, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Marco Grassi, Marche Polytechnic University, Italy
Nicola Henze, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany
Anup Kalia, North Carolina State University, Releigh, USA
Iolanda Leite, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Emiliano Lorini, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Viviana Mascardi, University of Genova, Italy
Alessandro Moschitti,University of Trento, Italy
Roberto Paredes, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS – LTCI, France
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria
Antonio Pizzo, University of Torino, Italy
Daniele Radicioni, University of Torino, Italy
Francisco Rangel, Autoritas Consulting, Spain
Antonio Reyes, Lab. Tecnologias Linguisticas, ISIT, Mexico
Bjoern Schuller, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari, Italy
Michael Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Andrea Valle, University of Torino, Italy
Enrico Zovato, Nuance Communications, Italy

PUBLICITY CHAIR
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Cristina Battaglino, University of Torino, Italy
email: battagli@di.unito.it

SPONSORS
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The ESSEM 2013 workshop is under the auspices of:

– Working Group on Natural Language Processing of the AI*IA: https://sites.google.com/a/aixia.it/nlp/
– CELI: http://www.celi.it/en/
– Associazione Informatica Musicale Italiana (AIMI): http://www.aimi-musica.org/
– CIRMA: http://www.cirma.unito.it/eng/
– WIQ-EI – Web Information Quality Evaluation Initiative

CONTACT
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If you have any questions regarding the workshop please send us an e-mail to: essem2013@easychair.org

Workshop web site: http://di.unito.it/essem

The CFP has been also published on the sentic.net web site:
http://sentic.net/essem/