AAAI Spring Symposium on

Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications

AAAI-EAAT 2004

March 22-24, 2004, Stanford University

Symposium  Description

Human language technology systems have typically focused on the "factual" aspect of content analysis.  Other aspects, including pragmatics, point of view, and style, have received much less attention.  However, to achieve an adequate understanding of a text, these aspects cannot be ignored.

In this symposium, we address computer-based analysis of “point of view”.  Our goal is to bring together people from academia, government, and industry to explore annotation, modeling, mining, and classification of opinion, subjectivity, attitude, and affect in text, across a range of text management applications.

The symposium therefore addresses a rather wide range of issues, from theoretical questions and models, through annotation standards and methods, to algorithms for recognizing, clustering, characterizing, and displaying attitudes and affect in text.  Despite growing interest in this area, with papers recently published in major conferences and new corpora developed, there has never been a workshop or symposium that targets a wide audience of researchers and practitioners on these topics.

We expect focused discussions of current challenges, existing models, and future directions.  A joint session with the "Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations" symposium is planned.

We invite contributions on methodological, technical, and application-oriented aspects of this emerging subfield in text processing, including but not limited to the following list of topics.

 Topics of Interest

Types and models of subjective information

•     Opinion, sentiment, point of view

•     Affect, emotion

•     Uncertainty, doubt, and related epistemic qualities

Annotation

•     Categorization, and characteristics such as centrality, polarity, intensity

•     Annotation at different levels of granularity (expression, clause, sentence, discourse segment, document, multi-document)

•     Inter annotator agreement studies

•     Tools for annotation

•     Bootstrapping using machine-learned classifiers

Resources required for modeling subjectivity

•     Semantic lexicons

•     Lists of affect-bearing words and phrases

•     Ontologies

Methods for recognizing and modeling subjectivity

•     Classification models

•     Identifying subjective/opinionated/affective expressions

•     Contextual disambiguation of potentially subjective expressions

•     Discourse segmentation

•     Clustering techniques

•     Summarization techniques

•     Fusion of points of view

Methods for displaying and visualizing subjectivity

•     Clustering techniques

•     Visualization tools

Evaluation

•     As a component technology

•     As a standalone technology

Applications

•     Government applications

•     Opinion and affect oriented question answering systems

•     Affect and opinion oriented retrieval and extraction systems

•     CRM (Customer Relation Management) system

•     Newsgroups and other text

Important Dates

Abstracts and full papers                           October 3, 2003

Notification of acceptance                         November 7, 2003

Final versions of abstracts and papers        January 30, 2004

Application for Student Funding                 January 25, 2004

Symposium                                               March 22 - 24, 2004

Student Funding

We have a limited amount of money to support graduate student travel.  If you want to be considered for funding, please send an informal application (click here for student travel funding details) to the Symposium co-chairs by January 25, 2004

Submission Information

Submissions can be extended abstracts (three pages) or full papers (up to eight pages).  Accepted papers will be published in the symposium proceedings. 

•     Please follow carefully the formatting instructions of AAAI when preparing your submission/final version. Instructions can be found at
      http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/authorinstructions.pdf.
•     Templates and macros for LaTeX and Word can be found at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/macros-link.html.
•     Postscript/PDF-submissions in AAAI format should be sent to:

Organizing Committee

Yan Qu, (Co-Chair), Clairvoyance Corporation (yqu at clairvoyancecorp dot com)
James G. Shanahan, (Co-Chair), Clairvoyance Corporation (jimi at clairvoyancecorp dot com)
Janyce Wiebe, (Co-Chair), University of Pittsburgh (wiebe at cs dot pitt dot edu)
Claire Cardie, Cornell University (cardie at cs.cornell dot edu)
Eduard Hovy, USC/Information Sciences Institute (hovy at isi dot edu)
Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University (liddy at mailbox dot syr dot edu)
 

Reviewers

Michele Banko, Microsoft Research, USA

Phil Beineke, Stanford University, USA

Eric Breck, Cornell University, USA

Koji Eguchi, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Nancy Green, University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA

Gregory Grefenstette, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA

Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Columbia University, USA

Matthew Hurst, Intelliseek, Inc., USA

Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Jussi Karlgren, Swedidh Institute of Computer Science, Sweden

Hidetsugu Nanba, Hiroshima City University, Japan 

Vincent Ng, Cornell University, USA

Kamal Nigam, Intelliseek, Inc., USA

     Victoria L. Rubin, Syracuse University, USA

Ves Stoyanov, Cornell University, USA

Simone Teufel, Cambridge University, UK

Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA

Nina Wacholder, Rutgers University, USA

Theresa Wilson, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Hong Yu, Columbia University, USA

	Clairvoyance talks
	Clairvoyance research

Last update of this page: February 18, 2004