Emotions, Modality and the Semantic Web (SEMOD 2015)
co-located with the 12th Extended Semantic Web Conference - ESWC2015, Portoroz, Slovenia, 31th May - 4th June, 2015
As the Web rapidly evolves, people are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about interacting, sharing, and collaborating through social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis, and the like. In recent years, this collective intelligence has spread to many different areas, with particular focus on fields related to everyday life such as commerce, tourism, education, and health, causing the size of the social Web to expand exponentially.
To identify the emotions (e.g. sentiment polarity, sadness, happiness, anger, irony, sarcasm, etc.) and the modality (e.g. doubt, certainty, obligation, liability, desire, etc.) expressed in this continuously growing content is critical to enable the correct interpretation of the opinions expressed or reported about social events, political movements, company strategies, marketing campaigns, product preferences, etc.
This has raised growing interest both within the scientific community, by providing it with new research challenges, as well as in the business world, as applications such as marketing and financial prediction would gain remarkable benefits.
One of the main application tasks in this context is opinion mining (Bo & Lee, 2008), which is addressed by a significant number of Natural Language Processing techniques, e.g. for distinguishing objective from subjective statements (Wiebe & Ellen, 2005), as well as for more fine-grained analysis of sentiment, such as polarity and emotions (Liu, 2012). Recently, this has been extended to the detection of irony, humor, and other forms of figurative language (Paula, Sarmento, Silva, & de Oliveira, 2009, Reyes, Rosso, & Buscaldi, 2012). In practice, this has led to the organisation of a series of shared tasks on sentiment analysis, including irony and figurative language detection (SemEval 2013, 2014, 2015), with the production of annotated data and development of running systems
However, existing solutions still have many limitations leaving the challenge of emotions and modality analysis still open. For example, there is the need for building/enriching semantic/cognitive resources for supporting emotion and modality recognition and analysis. Additionally, the joint treatment of modality and emotion is, computationally, trailing behind, and therefore the focus of ongoing, current research. Also, while we can produce rather robust deep semantic analysis of natural language, we still need to tune this analysis towards the processing of sentiment and modalities, which cannot be addressed by means of statistical models only, currently the prevailing approaches to sentiment analysis in NLP. The hybridization of NLP techniques with Semantic Web technologies is therefore a direction worth exploring, as recently shown in (Reforgiato Recupero, Presutti, Consoli, & Gangemi, 2014), (Saif, He, & Alani, 2012), (Gangemi, Presutti, & Reforgiato Recupero, 2014) and (Cambria & Hussain, 2012).
This workshop intends to be a discussion forum gathering researchers from Cognitive Linguistics, NLP, Semantic Web, and related areas for presenting their ideas on the relation between Semantic Web and the study of emotions and modalities.
Includes but not limited to:
Opinion mining, sentiment analysis, analysis of emotions and modalities are popular topics in the Natural Language Processing and Linguistics research fields. Regular workshops and challenges (shared tasks) on these themes are organized as co-located events with major conferences, such as IJCAI and ACL. Another recently organized related event is the MOMA (Models for Modality Annotation), a workshop that will be held in London (April 2015) in conjunction with the International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2015). Our workshop intends to complement these events, focusing on the relation between these topics and the Semantic Web.
This workshop proposal is a follow-up of ESWC 2014 workshop on “Semantic Web and Sentiment Analysis”. Following last year experience we propose a half day event. Although last year edition received a low number of paper submissions, the workshop was very successful in terms of participation, with an average of 20 attendees, excluding the organizers.
Based on the lessons learnt from the first edition, this year the scope of the workshop is a bit broader (although still focusing on a very specific domain) and accepted submissions will include abstracts and position papers in addition to full papers. The workshop’s main focus will be discussion rather than presentations, which are seen as seeds for boosting discussion topics, and an expected result will be a joint manifesto and a research roadmap that will provide the Semantic Web community with inspiring research challenges.
After a possible keynote presentation (of about 30 minutes), there will be a slot dedicated to long paper presentations (max 10 minutes each including questions). The rest of time will be dedicated to discussion leaving 15 minutes for a wrap-up session.
During the discussion session, contributors will have a short time to introduce their statements (from abstracts and position papers), which will be followed by discussion moderated by one of the chairs. A scriber will be nominated to take the minutes of the discussion, which will be the input of a joint manifesto.
Last but not least, should this workshop proposal and a challenge proposal related to the semantic sentiment analysis be accepted at ESWC2015, the two events will have several interconnections and the workshop, following the same experience of the last year, will definitely include a talk from the submitted system to the challenge.
Submission criteria are the following:
Accepted papers will be published by CEUR--WS. The best paper (according to the reviewers' rate) will be published within the main conference proceedings.
At least one of the authors of the accepted papers must register for both the main conference and the workshop to be included into the workshop proceedings.
Valentina Presutti is a researcher at ISTC-CNR. She was the CNR scientific representative and coordinator in the EU funded IKS Project, which bootstrapped the Apache Stanbol project. She has served as General Chair of ESWC 2014, Program Chair of ESWC 2013 and iSemantics 2012 and is in the steering committee of the Workshop of Semantic Web and Ontology patterns, for which she has served as Chair twice. She recently was appointed co-director of the Summer School on Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering (SSSW). Her research interest spans from knowledge extraction (including type induction, relation extraction, and sentiment analysis) to ontology design (with focus on ontology design patterns). She published more than 60 articles about these topics in international journals and peer-reviewed conferences.
Aldo Gangemi is full professor at LIPN, University Paris 13 (Sorbonne Cité, CNRS UMR 7030), and researcher at ISTC-CNR, Rome. His research focuses on Semantic Technologies as an integration of methods from Knowledge Engineering, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Natural Language Processing. Applications domains include Medicine, Law, eGovernment, Agriculture and Fishery, Business, and Cultural Heritage. He has published more than 150 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences and books, and serves as committee member of international journals (Applied Ontology, Semantic Web), general or program chair of international conferences (FOIS1998, LREC2006, EKAW2008, WWW2015), and in advisory committees for international organizations (SEMIC, ECDC). He has worked in the EU projects: Galen, WonderWeb, OntoWeb, Metokis, NeOn, BONy, and IKS. He has co-chaired 13 workshops organized jointly with international conference series such as LREC, ESWC, ISWC, WWW.
Malvina Nissim is a Lecturer in Language Technology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on the computational handling of several lexical semantics and discourse phenomena, including the annotation and automatic detection of modality and more in general opinion mining in social media. Her work is published in major conferences and journals (such as CL, ACM, ACL, EMNLP). She has recently co-organised the first shared task on sentiment analysis on Italian tweets, within the international Evalita campaign. Malvina is also the co-organiser of MOMA 2015 (Models for Modality Annotation), workshop to be held as part of IWCS 2015. She graduated in Linguistics from the University of Pisa, and obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pavia. Before joining the University of Groningen, she was a tenured researcher at the University of Bologna (2006-2014), and a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh (2001-2005) and at the Institute for Cognitive Science and Technologies of CNR, Italy (2005-2006).
Diego Reforgiato Recupero is a Post Doctoral Researcher at STLab-CNR, working on Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing. In 2005 he was awarded a 3 year Post Doc fellowship with the University of Maryland where he won the Computer World Horizon Award in the USA for the best research project on OASYS, an opinion analysis system commercialized by SentiMetrix, which he has co-founded. He is a patent co-owner in the field of data mining and sentiment analysis (20100023311). Diego is also a co-founder of R2M Solution, where he currently serves on the board of directors. He co-organised the ESWC 2014 Challenge on Concept-Based Sentiment Analysis and the first edition of the Workshop on Semantic Sentiment Analysis held at ESWC 2014. He has research experience across a wide array of industrial and FP7 research projects.
Hassan Saif is currently a PhD student and a part-time research assistant at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), The Open University. Before joining KMI, Hassan worked as research assistant at the University of Lincoln, UK and as research engineer for Nordic Sense, Finland and EduSoft, Arab Emirates. Hassan’s research interests are focused on Semantic Sentiment Analysis of microblogs, and more specifically on how semantics can be used to enhance current Sentiment Analysis models. Hassan has published a series of articles about this topic in various leading conferences and journals (WWW, ISWC, ESWC, LREC) and his research has driven the development of novel sentiment analysis technology for two EU funded projects (ROBUST and Sense4us).
Semantic Sentiment Analysis 2014
to be defined
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