[agents] Second Call for Papers: ESSEM 2013 - International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media

[Viviana Patti]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

----------------2nd CALL FOR PAPERS----------------

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

Turin, Italy, December 3rd, 2013

Workshop website: http://di.unito.it/essem
Submission deadline: September 15th, 2013

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

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Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Essem2013
Spread the news: #essem2013
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NEWS
----

- KEYNOTE: "Creative Natural Language Processing" by Carlo Strapparava, 
FBK-irst, Italy
http://di.unito.it/essemkeynote

- CALL FOR ARTWORKS: the call for artworks is now OPEN. 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
http://www.di.unito.it/~patti/essem13/call4artworks-essem13.pdf

- ESSEM 2013 is endorsed by the Working Group on Natural Language 
Processing of AI*IA

RATIONALE
---------

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
------

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
- 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
--------------------------------------------

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
---------

- September 15th, 2013: Paper submission deadline
- October 15th, 2013: Notification of acceptance
- October, 31st, 2013: Early registration
- November 4th, 2013: Final manuscripts due
- December 3rd, 2013: Workshop date


PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION
----------------------------

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
-----------

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 workshop might be followed by a special issue on an ISI journal 
(details to be announced).


KEYNOTE: Creative Natural Language Processing
by Carlo Strapparava, FBK-irst, Italy
---------------------------------------------

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
---------------

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
-----------------

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 at 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
-------

If you have any questions regarding the workshop please send us an 
e-mail to: essem2013 at 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/