23.05.2016	The WASSA 2016 program is available. here.
13.04.2016	The WASSA 2016 program will be available shortly.
20.03.2016	Due to the extension of the submission deadline, the notification deadline has been moved to March 25th. Thank you for your understanding.
21.02.2016	The submission deadline has been extended to March 6th.
25.01.2016	The first call for hackathon participation now launched.
22.01.2016	The WASSA invited speakers are Dr. Seth Grimes, Dr. Morteza Dehghani and Dr. Richard Socher
22.01.2016	The WASSA 2016 Proceedings will contain a special section entitled "Reflections on the state of the area, current and future challenges", with invited short articles from the personalities who most contributed to the area so far.
15.01.2016	Second Call for Papers now launched.
15.12.2015	First Call for Papers now launched.
15.12.2015	The WASSA 2016 website now launched.

Research in automatic Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (SSA), as subtasks of Affective Computing and Natural Language Processing (NLP), has flourished in the past years. The growth in interest in these tasks was motivated by the birth and rapid expansion of the Social Web that made it possible for people all over the world to share, comment or consult content on any given topic. In this context, opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in Social Media texts have been shown to have a high influence on the social and economic behaviour worldwide. SSA systems are highly relevant to many real-world applications (e.g. marketing, eGovernance, business intelligence, social analysis) and also to many tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP) - information extraction, question answering, textual entailment, to name just a few. The importance of this field has been proven by the high number of approaches proposed in research in the past decade, as well as by the interest that it raised from other disciplines (Economics, Sociology, Psychology) and the applications that were created using its technology. In spite of the growing body of research in the area in the past years, dealing with affective phenomena in text has proven to be a complex, interdisciplinary problem that remains far from being solved. Its challenges include the need to address the issue from different perspectives and at different levels, depending on the characteristics of the textual genre, the language(s) treated and the final application for which the analysis is done.

The aim of the 7th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2016) is to continue the line of the previous editions, bringing together researchers in Computational Linguistics working on Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis and researchers working on interdisciplinary aspects of affect computation from text. Additionally, starting with WASSA 2013, we extended the focus to Social Media phenomena and the impact of affect-related phenomena in this context. In this new proposed edition, we would like to encourage the submission of long and short research and demo papers including, but not restricted to the following topics related to subjectivity and sentiment analysis:

Download the pdf version of the CFP.

We encourage the submission of long and short research and demo papers including, but not restricted to the following topics related to subjectivity, sentiment and social media analysis:

• Lexical semantic resources, corpora and annotations for subjectivity, sentiment and social media analysis; (semi-)automatic corpora generation and annotation
• The use of semantic resources and methods (knowledge bases, semantic representations, inference mechanisms) for subjectivity, sentiment and emotion analysis;
• Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, aggregation and summarization
• Trend detection in social media using subjectivity and sentiment analysis techniques
• Data linking through social networks based on affect-related NLP methods
• Impact of affective data from social media
• Mass opinion estimation based on NLP and statistical models
• Online reputation management
• Topic and sentiment studies and applications of topic-sentiment analysis
• Domain, topic and genre dependency of sentiment analysis
• Ambiguity issues and word sense disambiguation of subjective language
• Pragmatic analysis of the opinion mining task
• Use of Semantic Web technologies for subjectivity and sentiment analysis
• Improvement of NLP tasks using subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis
• Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations subjectivity and sentiment analysis
• Subjectivity, sentiment and emotion detection in social networks
• Classification of stance in dialogues
• Applications of sentiment and social media analysis systems

In the light of the fact that different sentiment analysis systems have been proposed and showcased in the past years, we feel there is a growing need to make other researchers and users familiar with these systems and have them employ them for building an end application. The Hackathon word stands for "Hacking Marathon", and its purpose is to introduce some technology or software toolkit to the attendees, and let then "play" and develop ideas around it.
We invite submissions for descriptions of sentiment analysis systems that can used during the hackathon.
We envisage providing the systems with different types of data, in different languages and from different domains. Subsequently, the sentiment analysis systems participating in the hackathon will process these data for the different applications envisaged by the users.
The following data will be provided for training and "playing around"/evaluation:

• Europe Media Monitor data with mentions of entities in news (reported speech, quotations) - multilingual
• annotated sentiment data from Twitter (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French)
• annotated sentiment data from Facebook (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French)
• OpeNER news: sentences from news articles annotated with opinion holders, expressions and targets (Dutch, German, English, French)
• OpeNER hotel reviews annotated with opinion holders, expressions and targets (Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German)