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The 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Informal Text (NLPIT 2016)
In conjunction with The World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016)
April 11-15, 2016, Montreal, Canada
http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~badiehm/nlpit2016/
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Overview
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The rapid growth of Internet usage in the last two decades adds new challenges to understand the informal user generated content (UGC) on the Internet. Textual UGC refers to textual posts on social media, blogs, emails, chat conversations, instant messages, forums, reviews, or advertisements that are created by end-users of an online system. A large portion of language used on textual UGC is informal. Informal text is the style of writing that disregards language grammars and uses a mixture of abbreviations and context dependent terms. The straightforward application of state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing approaches on informal text typically results in significantly degraded performance due to the following reasons: the lack of sentence structure; the lack of enough context required; the seldom entities involved; the noisy sparse contents of users' contributions; and the untrusted facts contained. It is the aim of this work- shop to bring the attention of researchers to the opportunities and challenges involved in informal text processing. In particular, we are interested in discussing informal text modeling, normalization, mining, and understanding in addition to various application areas in which UGC is involved.

Topics
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We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following core NLP approaches for informal UGC: language identification, classification, clustering, filtering, summarization, tokenization, segmentation, morphological analysis, POS tagging, parsing, named entity extraction, named entity disambiguation, relation/fact extraction, semantic annotation, sentiment analysis, language normalization, informality modeling and measuring, language generation, handling uncertainties, machine translation, ontology construction, dictionary construction, etc.

Submission
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Authors are invited to submit original work not submitted to another conference or workshop. Workshop submissions could be a full paper or short paper. Paper length should not exceed 10 pages for full papers and 5 pages for short papers. All papers should be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers in PDF can be sent via the EasyChair Conference System (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nlpit2016). Each submission will receive, in addition to a meta-review, at least 2 peer double-blind reviews. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity must be avoided. Each full paper will get 25 minutes presentation time. Short papers will get 5 minutes presentation time in addition to a poster. Beside papers, we also plan to have an invited talk by a renowned scientist on a topic relevant for the workshop. Workshop proceedings will be published as part of the WWW2016 workshop proceedings. To contact the NLPIT 2016 organization team, please send an e-mail to: nlpit2016@easychair.org.

Deadlines
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- Submission deadline: December 22, 2015
- Notification deadline: February 2, 2016
- Camera-ready version: February 8, 2016
- Workshop date: April 11-15, 2016

Organizers
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- Mena B. Habib, University of Twente, The Netherlands.
- Florian Kunneman, Radboud University, The Netherlands.
- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands.

Program Committee
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- Alexandra Balahur, The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), Italy
- Barbara Plank, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
- Djoerd Hiemstra, University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Kevin Gimpel, Toyota Technological Institute, USA
- Marieke van Erp, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Natalia Konstantinova, University of Wolverhampton, UK
- Robert Remus, ExB Group, Germany
- Wang Ling, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
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