Third Workshop on Social Media for Personalization And Search (SoMePeAS 2019)
In conjunction with the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2019)
Cologne, Germany - April 14, 2018


CALL FOR PAPERS
In order to improve the web experience of the users, classic personalization technologies (e.g., recommender systems) and search engines usually rely on static schemes. Indeed, users are allowed to express ratings in a fixed range of values for a given catalogue of products, or to express a query that usually returns the same set of webpages/products for all the users.

With the advent of social media, users have been allowed to create new content and to express opinions and preferences through likes and textual comments. Moreover, the social network itself can provide information on who influences whom. Being able to mine usage and collaboration patterns in social media and to analyze the content generated by the users opens new frontiers in the generation of personalization services and in the improvement of search engines. Moreover, recent technological advances, such as deep learning, are able to provide a context to the analyzed data. Even though social media platforms offer an abundance of data, recent regulations like the GDPR, limit the way in which personal data is collected, treated, and stored. Hence, users’ consent and privacy has become a prominent and timely issue.

Our workshop solicits contributions in all topics related to employing social media for personalization and search purposes, focused (but not limited) to the following list:

- Recommender systems;
- Search and tagging;
- Query expansion;
- User modeling and profiling;
- Advertising and ad targeting;
- Content classification, categorization, and clustering;
- Using social network features/community detection algorithms for personalization and search purposes;
- Privacy-aware algorithms.


IMPORTANT DATES
- Paper submission: February 4, 2019
- Notification of acceptance: February 18, 2019
- Camera-ready version: March 9, 2019
- Workshop date: April 14, 2018

TYPES OF CONTRIBUTIONS
We will consider three different submission types, all in the LNCS format: regular (14 pages), short (8 pages) and extended abstracts (4 pages).

- Research and position papers (regular or short) should be clearly placed with respect to the state of the art and state the contribution of the proposal in the domain of application, even if presenting preliminary results. In particular, research papers should describe the methodology in detail, experiments should be repeatable, and a comparison with the existing approaches in the literature should be made where possible.
- Position papers(short) should introduce novel point of views in the workshop topics or summarize the experience of a researcher or a group in the field.
- Practice and experience reports (short) should present in detail the real-world scenarios in which social media is employed for personalization and search purposes.
- Demo proposals (extended abstract) should present the details of a prototype or complete application that employs social media for personalization and search purposes. The systems will be demonstrated to the workshop attendees.

The reviewing process will be coordinated by the organizers. Each paper will receive three reviews: two externals to the organizing committee and one internal. The external reviewers will be contacted according to their expertise in the paper topic.

PROCEEDINGS
All accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website together with the material generated during the meeting. The SoMePeAS 2019 Workshop proceedings will also be available in a volume (whose details will be given soon), and indexed on DBLP and Scopus. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version in a journal special issue.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submission must be written in English and follow the ECIR paper guidelines, available at http://irsg.bcs.org/proceedings/ECIR_Draft_Guidelines.pdf. All papers must be formatted according to the LNCS format style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Papers should be submitted in PDF format, electronically, using the EasyChair submission system, available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=somepeas2019

INVITED SPEAKER
TBA

CONTACTS
http://somepeas.di.uniroma1.it/somepeas-ws2019.html
For general enquiries regarding the workshop, send an email to both the organizers at ludovico.boratto@acm.org, stilo@di.uniroma1.it

ORGANIZERS
Ludovico Boratto (EURECAT, Spain)
Giovanni Stilo (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)