COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF PEOPLE’S OPINIONS, PERSONALITY, AND EMOTIONS IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Workshop co-located with Coling 2016 - Osaka, Japan, 12 December 2016

On social media, users nowadays freely express what is on their mind at any moment in time, at any location, and about virtually anything. These large amounts of spontaneously produced texts open up a unique opportunity to learn more about such users, e.g., predicting demographic variables (age, gender), but also personality types, as well as emotions and opinion expressions.

Indeed, this excellent opportunity has materialized in a large and growing number of recent workshops held at different Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Web, and Information Retrieval venues, for example WASSA (focusing on sentiment and social media), PAN (focusing on author profiling like personality) and ESSEM (focusing on emotions in AI), including the organization of shared tasks such as at SemEval with a special sentiment track.

While it is evident that interest is wide and high, it is also evident that such aspects of human personality and behavior have been mostly studied in isolation, often in different - but related - communities. We believe that the time is ripe to bring these communities a step closer, to study people’s traits and expressions jointly and in their interplay.

On a conceptual level we can view these aspects on a continuum of stability, where some can be considered stable (e.g., gender), while others are of more transitional nature and contextually prompted (e.g., emotions). They can be seen as characterizing traits of the whole person and should be studied together. As of now, however, little is known on how they interact with one another in computational language modeling, or how they can inform each other in modeling people or improving natural language processing tools.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing who share an interest in personality, opinion and emotion detection, and especially in researching the intertwining of such traits and expressions. We believe that COLING is a particularly well-suited venue for kicking-off a discussion forum on modeling these aspects from a language processing perspective.

We encourage the submission of long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) research papers, including opinion statements. We especially welcome views from different fields on how to treat the different aspects. We welcome submissions related but not limited to the following topics:

• opinion, personality and emotion detection in social media
• predicting demographic variables and author traits (gender, age, personality)
• opinions, personality and emotions and their interactions
• interaction between personality, opinion and emotions with demographic variables (age, gender)
• interaction between personality, opinion and emotions and geo-spatial information (geographic locations and places)
• interaction between personality, opinion and emotions with politics
• personality, opinion and emotions and social network analysis
• modeling of personality, opinion and emotions from a multimodal perspective
• exploitation of the different degree of stability of the various traits
• reflections on the definition of personal traits
• applications of predictive modeling of user traits
• on the ethics of predictive modeling of social variables

Keynote speaker: Saif Mohammad, NRC Canada

Paper Submission

Standard research papers should be a maximum of 8 pages long, plus two pages of references. We also encourage the submission of short papers of maximum 4 pages, plus two pages of references . All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the START system. Submissions must be anonymous and follow the Coling 2016 formatting guidelines The deadline for submission is September 25 extended to October 2nd, 23:59 UTC-12:00.

Programme Committee

• Jason Baldridge, People Pattern, US
• Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy
• Valerio Basile, INRIA Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée, France
• Cristina Bosco, University of Turin, Italy
• Gosse Bouma, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Fabio Celli, University of Trento, Italy
• Chloé Clavel, LTCI-CNRS, Telecom-ParisTech, France
• Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
• Morena Danieli, University of Trento, Italy
• Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, India
• Dan Hardt, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
• Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• David Jurgens, Stanford University, US
• Svetlana Kiritchenko, NRC-Canada, Canada
• Florian Kuhnemann, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• Bing Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago, US
• Kim Luyckx, Biomina Research Group, Belgium
• Saif Mohammad, NRC-Canada, Canada
• Scott Nowson, Accenture Centre for Innovation, Dublin, Ireland
• Dong Nguyen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Martin Potthast, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
• Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, University of Pennsylvania, US
• Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
• H. Andrew Schwartz, Stony Brook University, US
• Carlo Strapparava, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Trento, Italy
• Marko Tkalcic, Free University of Bolzano, Italy
• Ben Verhoeven, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Organisers

• Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen
• Viviana Patti, University of Turin
• Barbara Plank, University of Groningen