Special Session on Semantics and Sociolinguistics in Social Media

Call for Papers
This Special session addresses the use of semantic models and approaches that capture social communications in natural language for social media. The ever-growing and popular social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogosphere, Wikipedia) abounds in social interactions expressed by natural language. People use different linguistic styles and language uses to express their social acts
and create their social footprint. In their interactions, people group themselves by interest, recognize leaders and pursue different goals, individually or collaboratively. In this context, the need for semantic modeling involved in the automatic processing of language is social media is a key component.

Papers are welcomed to address:

1. the development of semantic models informed by sociolinguistics, psychology or communication sciences for capturing the social acts observed in social media, e.g. recognition of influencers, support for political attitudes or grass-roots movements;
2. semantic methods aiming the recognition of emerging events in social media, e.g. public heath syndromic surveillance or natural disaster response;
3. predicting the characteristics of a social group or an individual from their linguistic communication, e.g. age, gender, culture, emotional state etc.

Contributions are solicited for oral presentations (6-8 pages).

For submission guidelines (i.e. templates, style guide) please refer to the ICSC 2012 submissions section

Important Dates:
Tuesday, May 08, 2012 Submission Deadline
Friday, June 15, 2012 Author Notification
Friday, July 13, 2012 Camera Ready Deadline
September 19-21, 2012, ICSC conference and special session in Palermo Italy

Organizing Committee:
Mona Diab, Columbia University, USA
Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA