C A L L    F O R    P A P E R S


AAAI Spring 2006 Symposium
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYSING WEBLOGS
(CAAW-2006)


Mar 27-29, 2006, Stanford University,
California, USA
http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium/


INTRODUCTION

Weblogs are web pages which provide unedited, highly 
opinionated personal commentary. Often weblogs (also
referred to as blogs) are chronological sequences of
entries which include hyperlinks to other resources.
Blogs are conveniently maintained and published with 
authoring tools.

The blogosphere as a whole can be exploited for
outreach opinion formation, maintaining online
communities, supporting knowledge management within
large global collaborative environments, monitoring 
reactions to public events and is seen as the
upcoming alternative to the mass media.

Semantic analysis of blogs represents the next
challenge in the quest for understanding natural
language. Their light content, fragmented topic 
structure, inconsistent grammar, and vulnerability
to spam makes blog analysis extremely challenging.
Despite the growing relevance of blogs and an ever
increasing population of bloggers existing research
has hardly addressed the spectrum of issues that
arise in analyzing blogs. Blogs are a different
kind of document than the relatively clean text
that NLP research is based on. Such differences
in term of structure, content and grammaticality 
will be a challenge considering that blogs will
likely represent the most common way of publicly
accessible personal _expression.


AREAS OF INTEREST

This symposium aims to bring together researchers 
from different subject areas (e.g., computer science,
linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology,
multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster
discussions about ongoing research in the following
areas:

[01] AI methods for ethnographic analysis through
blogs.

[02] Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the
influence of blogs on the media.

[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs;
ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking 
based on blogs.

[04] Crawling/spidering and indexing.

[05] Human Computer Interaction; blogging tools;
navigation.

[06] Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing;
aggregating information from different modalities. 

[07] Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking;
named relations and fact extraction; discourse
analysis; summarization.

[08] Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured
knowledge management.

[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion
identification and extraction.

[10] Social Network Analysis; communities identification;
expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.

[11] Text categorization; gender/age identification; 
spam filtering.

[12] Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability
of phenomena based on blogs.

[13] Trend identification/tracking.


IMPORTANT DATES

Oct 28, 2005 Submissions due. 
Nov 4, 2005 Acceptance decisions mailed out.
Nov 30, 2005 Student travel grant application due.
Jan 27, 2005 Camera-ready versions due.
Mar 27-29, 2006 Symposium.


SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should email 
a technical paper (up to 8 pages), a short paper
(up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description
(up to 2 pages), a position paper or a statement
of interest (1 page) to the e-mail specified in
the Contacts section by midnight (PST) of 
Oct 7, 2005.

Each submission should, to the extent possible,
indicate a list of relevant areas from the list
above (e.g., 03, 04, 10).

We have limited funds to assist with travel
expenses graduate students (for more information 
see the symposium website).


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

* Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Communications.
* Franco Salvetti, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
* Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania.
* James H. Martin, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder. 


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Paolo Avesani, ITC-irst, Italy.
* Bran Boguraev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA.
* Claire Cardie, Cornell Univ., USA.
* Scott Carter, UC Berkeley, USA.
* Steve Cayzer, HP Labs Bristol, UK. 
* Thierry Declerck, DFKI Language Technology Lab, Germany.
* Michelle Gumbrecht, Stanford Univ., USA.
* Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel.
* Roy Lipski, Corpora Software, UK.

* Cameron Marlow, MIT Media Lab, US.
* Llu=EDs M=E0rquez, Universitat Polit=E8cnica de Catalunya, Spain. 
* Rada Mihalcea, Univ. of North Texas, USA.
* Peter Norvig, Google Inc., USA.
* Peter Pirolli, PARC, USA.
* Oana Postolache, Univ. of Saarland, Germany.

* John Prager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA.
* Alessandro Provetti, Univ. of Messina, Italy.
* Drago Radev, Univ. of Michigan, USA. 
* Jonathon Read, Univ. of Sussex, UK. 

* Ellen Riloff, Univ. of Utah, USA. 

* Irina Rish, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA.
* James G. Shanahan, Clairvoyance Corp., USA.
* Suresh Sood, Univ. of Technology Sydney, Australia.
* Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA.

* Carlo Strapparava, ITC-irst, Italy.
* V.S. Subrahmanian, Univ. of Maryland at College Park, USA.
* Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA.
* Janyce M. Wiebe, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA.
* Tong Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA.

SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS 

We are planning to publish the proceedings
of the symposium as AAAI Technical Report.


CONTACT

For questions and submissions:
aaai2006_weblog_symposium@umbrialistens.com 

For further information about the symposium:
http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium/