Special issue of Intelligenza Artificiale _Natural Language Processing in the Web Era_, deadline for submission: June 15th.

Subject: [HLT] Call for Paper: Special Issue on NLP in the Web Era

                            Call for papers

Special issue on Natural Language Processing in the Web Era

Intelligenza Artificiale, Volume 6.2, scheduled for December 2012

Guest editors: Roberto Basili and Bernardo Magnini

THEMES

Natural Language is still the main carrier for the definition, synthesis and exchange of knowledge in the real world, and this is entirely reflected in the Web contents. Although the growing levels of integration, multichannel and modalities of the information made available in the current Web, thus including the Social Web bodies of resources, the central role of language in e-mails, blogs, twits as well as multimedia pages cannot be denied. Notice that even for pictures, videos or audio information (including news or artistic materials) natural language is crucial in the annotation, explanation and delivery processes.

Unfortunately, the increase in volumes also corresponds to a growing complexity in terms of needs, phenomena and applications. While social media often introduce specific sublanguages that are still largely unexplored by current language processing tools, the pervasive noise and incompleteness that characterize real documents in blogs, forums or SMS channels also amplify requirements such as coverage and robustness of the NLP technology. On the other side, while knowledge representation technologies require massive amount of Web data to be traced, linked and semantically harmonized, this enterprise is tightly bound by the quality of the linguistic interpretation capabilities that the underlying integration systems can exhibit. Finally, the forms of information retrieval, exchange and sharing used commonly by large communities of Social Web users are such that the semantic management of smaller text units is crucially needed. Specific tasks, such as personalized document management or context-aware search in mobile applications are strongly tight to the interpretation of fine-grain phenomena, such as questions, short queries or twits. In these large scale distributed scenarios multilinguality is also an issue for language processing technologies.

The above challenges and the topics related to research advances in this area are all central to this special issue. Original research papers as well as surveys of on-going work in specific sectors are welcomed. The aim is to provide to researchers both in the academic and industrial sectors a comprehensive picture of a largely multidisciplinary field. We are soliciting contributions related to the following, not exhaustive, set of themes:

• Semantic Web. Language processing for open linked data. Linguistic approaches to Ontology Learning, Reconciliation, and Population. Language Processing for Ontology Engineering. Semantic Web applications with explicit language processing components.
• Search. Question Answering. Lexical Semantic approaches to Intelligent Web Search. Semantic search. Enterprise Search. The use of Lexical Resources for Knowledge Search in the Web.
• Language and Learning. Computational Natural Language Learning from Web data. Machine Learning methods, models and algorithms for treating linguistic information implicit in Web data. Advanced Supervised learning for NLP. Semi-supervised and Unsupervised approaches for NLP over the Web.
• Web, Linguistic Resources and Knowledge Acquisition. Wikipedia-based knowledge acquisition. Machine Reading from Web sources. Web-scale Information Extraction.
• Multimodality. Human-Computer Interfaces. Speech and Language based interface. Multimodal Interaction. Digital assistants. Language-based Mobile and Web applications.
• Social media. New languages of the Social Web. Linguistic Treatment of Social Web data. Special-purpose lexical and grammatical models for Web 2.0 languages. Folksonomies and Language Processing. Lexical knowledge and Cloud Tags.
• Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Modeling and Recommending. Language Processing approaches to Opinion Analysis. Emotional computing. Digital Advertisement and Persuasion.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Deadline for submission: June 15th, 2012
• List of papers selected: July 30th , 2012
• Deadline for camera ready papers: September 15th 2012
• Publication: December 2012

THE JOURNAL

Intelligenza Artificiale (http://www.iospress.nl/journal/intelligenza-artificiale/), edited by IOS Press, is the official journal of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). Intelligenza Artificiale publishes rigorously reviewed articles (in English) in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, with a special attention to original contributions. It also publish assessments of the state of the art in various areas of AI, and innovative system descriptions with appropriate evaluation.

PRACTICAL ISSUES

Contributions (around 15 pages, PDF format) should be sent by email to the two guest editors, Bernardo Magnini (magnini at fbk.eu) and Roberto Basili (basili at info.uniroma2.it).

Detailed submission instructions are available on the Web site of the journal: http://www.iospress.nl/journal/intelligenza-artificiale/. The journal only publishes original contributions in English.

Web site:http://ai-nlp.info.uniroma2.it/basili/NLPiWE/SpecialIssueOnNLP_in_the_Web_era_CFP.html