AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text:
Theories and Applications (AAAI-EAAT 2004)

March 22-24, 2004, Stanford University

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.

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) systems 
--Newsgroups and other texts 
--Educational systems 
 
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. Statements of interest are for those who only want to
attend the workshop.

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:
EAAT2004@clairvoyancecorp.com

For more information see:
 
   http://www.clairvoyancecorp.com/Research/Workshops/AAAI-EAAT-2004/home.html
 
Important Dates

Abstracts and full papers: October 3, 2003
Notification of acceptance: November 7, 2003
Final versions of abstracts and papers: January 20, 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 to the workshop co-chairs by January 25, 2004

Organizing Committee

Yan Qu, (Co-Chair), Clairvoyance Corporation
James G. Shanahan, (Co-Chair), Clairvoyance Corporation
Janyce Wiebe, (Co-Chair), University of Pittsburgh
Claire Cardie, Cornell University
Eduard Hovy, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University