Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages in Social Media

Abstract

Welcome to the ACL Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2011)! Over the last few years, there has been a growing public and enterprise interest in 'social media' and their role in modern society. At the heart of this interest is the ability for users to create and share content via a variety of platforms such as blogs, micro-blogs, collaborative wikis, multimedia sharing sites, social networking sites etc. The volume and variety of user-generated content (UGC) and the user participation network behind it are creating new opportunities for understanding web-based practices and building socially intelligent and personalized applications. Investigations around social data can be broadly categorized along the following dimensions: (a) understanding aspects of the user-generated content (b) modeling and observing the user network that the content is generated in and (c) characterizing individuals and groups that produce and consume the content. The goals for this workshop are to focus on sharing research efforts and results in the area of understanding language usage on social media. While there is a rich body of previous work in processing textual content, certain characteristics of UGC on social media introduce challenges in their analyses. A large portion of language found in UGC is in the Informal English domain --- a blend of abbreviations, slang and context specific terms; lacking in sufficient context and regularities and delivered with an indifferent approach to grammar and spelling. Traditional content analysis techniques developed for a more formal genre like news, Wikipedia or scientific articles do not necessarily translate well to UGC. Consequently, well-understood problems such as information extraction, search or monetization on the Web are facing pertinent challenges and need to be revisited.