COLING 2016 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT)

Workshop Organizers

• Bo Han (Hugo AI)
• Alan Ritter (The Ohio State University)
• Leon Derczynski (The University of Sheffield)
• Wei Xu (The Ohio State University)
• Tim Baldwin (The University of Melbourne)

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Invited Speakers

• Ming-Wei Chang (Microsoft Research)
  From Entity Linking to Question Answering – Recent Progress on Semantic Grounding Tasks
• Barbara Plank (University of Groningen)
  Processing non-canonical or noisy text: fortuitous data to the rescue
• Kentaro Torisawa (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
  DISAANA and D-SUMM: Large-scale Real Time NLP Systems for Analyzing Disaster Related Reports in Tweets

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Program

	9:00	Opening
		Invited talk:
	9:10	DISAANA and D-SUMM: Large-scale Real Time NLP Systems for Analyzing Disaster Related Reports in Tweets Kentaro Torisawa
		Research presentations
	9:55	Private or Corporate? Predicting User Types on Twitter Nikola Ljubešić and Darja Fišer
	10:05	From Noisy Questions to Minecraft Texts: Annotation Challenges in Extreme Syntax Scenario Héctor Martínez Alonso, Djamé Seddah and Benoît Sagot
	10:15	Disaster Analysis using User-Generated Weather Report Yasunobu Asakura, Masatsugu Hangyo and Mamoru Komachi
	10:25	Veracity Computing from Lexical Cues and Perceived Certainty Trends Uwe Reichel and Piroska Lendvai
	10:35	Exploring Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Textual User-Generated Content Normalization Thales Felipe Costa Bertaglia and Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes
	10:45	Name Variation in Community Question Answering Systems Anietie Andy, Satoshi Sekine, Mugizi Rwebangira and Mark Dredze
	10:55	Lightning Talks / Posters (60 sec. / talk)
		Text normalization for endangered languages: A shared task challenge Patrick Littell, Shobhana Chelliah and Gina-Anne Levow
		Filtering Dialectal Arabic Text in Two Large Scale Annotation Projects Wajdi Zaghouani, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ossama Obeid, Sawsan Alqahtani, Mona Diab and Kemal Oflazer
		Whose Nickname is This? Recognizing Politicians from Their Aliases Wei-Chung Wang, Hung-Chen Chen, Zhi-Kai Ji, Hui-I Hsiao, Yu-Shian Chiu and Lun-Wei Ku
		Towards Accurate Event Detection in Social Media: A Weakly Supervised Approach for Learning Implicit Event Indicators Ajit Jain, Girish Kasiviswanathan and Ruihong Huang
		Unsupervised Stemmer for Arabic Tweets Fahad Albogamy and Allan Ramsay
		Topic Stability over Noisy Sources Jing Su, Derek Greene and Oisin Boydell
		Analysis of Twitter Data for Postmarketing Surveillance in Pharmacovigilance Julie Pain, Jessie Levacher, Adam Quinquenel and Anja Belz
		Named Entity Recognition and Hashtag Decomposition to Improve the Classification of Tweets Billal Belainine, Alexsandro Fonseca and Fatiha Sadat
		A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Arabizi-to-English Statistical Machine Translation Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza and Christof Monz
		How Document Pre-processing affects Keyphrase Extraction Performance Florian Boudin, Hugo Mougard and Damien Cram
		Japanese Text Normalization with Encoder-Decoder Model Taishi Ikeda, Hiroyuki Shindo and Yuji Matsumoto
	12:30	Lunch
		Invited talk:
	14:00	From Entity Linking to Question Answering – Recent Progress on Semantic Grounding Tasks Ming-Wei Chang
		Shared task session
	14:45	Results of the WNUT16 Named Entity Recognition Shared Task Benjamin Strauss, Bethany Toma, Alan Ritter, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Wei Xu
	15:55	Bidirectional LSTM for Named Entity Recognition in Twitter Messages Nut Limsopatham and Nigel Collier
	15:05	Twitter Geolocation Prediction Shared Task of the 2016 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text Bo Han, Afshin Rahimi, Leon Derczynski and Timothy Baldwin
	15:15	CSIRO Data61 at the WNUT Geo Shared Task Gaya Jayasinghe, Brian Jin, James Mchugh, Bella Robinson and Stephen Wan
	15:25	Shared task poster session
		Learning to recognise named entities in tweets by exploiting weakly labelled data Kurt Junshean Espinosa, Riza Theresa Batista-Navarro and Sophia Ananiadou
		Feature-Rich Twitter Named Entity Recognition and Classification Utpal Kumar Sikdar and Björn Gambäck
		Learning to Search for Recognizing Named Entities in Twitter Ioannis Partalas, Cédric Lopez, Nadia Derbas and Ruslan Kalitvianski
		DeepNNNER: Applying BLSTM-CNNs and Extended Lexicons to Named Entity Recognition in Tweets Fabrice Dugas and Eric Nichols
		ASU: An Experimental Study on Applying Deep Learning in Twitter Named Entity Recognition. Michel Naim Gerguis, Cherif Salama and M. Watheq El-Kharashi
		UQAM-NTL: Named entity recognition in Twitter messages Ngoc Tan LE, Fatma Mallek and Fatiha Sadat
		Semi-supervised Named Entity Recognition in noisy-text Shubhanshu Mishra and Jana Diesner
		Geolocation Prediction in Twitter Using Location Indicative Words and Textual Features Lianhua Chi, Kwan Hui Lim, Nebula Alam and Christopher J. Butler
		A Simple Scalable Neural Networks based Model for Geolocation Prediction in Twitter Yasuhide Miura, Motoki Taniguchi, Tomoki Taniguchi and Tomoko Ohkuma
		Invited talk:
	16:10	Processing non-canonical or noisy text: fortuitous data to the rescue Barbara Plank
	16:55	Awards and closing

For posters, COLING provides: A self-standing poster panel measuring 180 cm wide and 210 cm high. Sizes up to B0 landscape (1456 mm x 1030 mm; 57.32 inch x 40.55 inch) would be suitable.

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Important Dates

• July 6 2016: First call for workshop papers
• September 2016: Shared-task evaluations
• October 2 September 25 2016: Workshop paper due (extended due to author requests)
• October 19 October 16, 2016: Notification of acceptance
• October 30, 2016: Camera-ready due
• November 30, 2016: Official proceedings publication date
• December 11, 2016: Workshop date

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Call for Papers

We seek submissions of regular papers on original and unpublished work (same 8-page limit plus 2-page reference as COLING main conference). 1-page abstracts on work-in-progress or work published elsewhere are also welcome and will *not* be included in the conference proceedings. All accepted submissions will be presented as posters. Additionally, selected submissions will be presented orally. The shared-task participants are also encouraged (but not required) to submit system description papers and present posters; the top systems will be invited (but not required) to present orally.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• NLP Preprocessing of Noisy Text
• Part of speech tagging
• Named entity tagging, including a wide range of categories, e.g. product names
• Chunking of user-generated text
• Parsing
• Text Normalization and Error Correction
• Normalizing noisy text for downstream tasks and for human readability
• Error detection and correction
• Paraphrase identification and semantic similarity of short text or noisy text
• User prediction, e.g. geolocation, gender, age, etc
• Bilingual translation of noisy text
• Information extraction from noisy text
• Multilingual NLP in noisy text
• Colloquial language, e.g. idiom detection
• Domain adaptation to user-generated text
• Geolocation prediction
• Global and regional trend detection and event extraction
• Extracting user demographics, profiles and major life events
• Detecting rumors, contradictory information, sarcasms and humors on social media
• Sentiment analysis
• Temporal aspects of user-generated content (resolving time expressions, concept drift, diachronic analyses, etc...)

All submissions should conform to COLING 2016 style guidelines. Long and short paper submissions must be anonymized. Abstract submissions should include author information (and where the work was published in a footnote on front page, if applicable). Please submit your papers at https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/WNUT/.

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Shared task #1: Geolocation Prediction in Twitter

This new shared task focuses on the prediction of geolocation on the basis of text data (including Twitter metadata).
Task #1 Details
Registration: here
Evaluation Period: 18 September 2016
Contacts: Afshin Rahimi, Bo Han, Leon Derczynski and Tim Baldwin

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Shared task #2: Named Entity Recognition in Twitter

Task #2 Details
Registration: click here
Evaluation Period: September 9-16
Contacts: Benjamin Strauss, Bethany E. Toma, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, and Alan Ritter

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Program Committee

• David Bamman (University of California, Berkeley)
• Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield)
• Claire Cardie (Cornell University)
• Colin Cherry (National Research Council Canada)
• Grzegorz Chrupała (Tilburg University)
• Marina Danilevsky (IBM Research)
• Seza Doğruöz (Tilburg University)
• Heba Elfardy (Columbia University)
• Noura Farra (Columbia University)
• Eric Fosler-Lussier (The Ohio State University)
• Dan Garrette (University of Washington)
• Kevin Gimpel (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)
• Weiwei Guo (Yahoo! Research)
• Ben Hachey (Hugo AI)
• Masato Hagiwara (Duolingo)
• Hua He (University of Maryland)
• Ed Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Jing Jiang (Singapore Management University)
• Anna Jørgensen (University of Amsterdam)
• Nobuhiro Kaji (Yahoo! Research)
• Emre Kiciman (Microsoft Research)
• Chen Li (University of Texas at Dallas)
• Junyi Jessy Li (University of Pennsylvania)
• Wang Ling (Google DeepMind)
• Fei Liu (University of Central Florida)
• Huan Liu (Arizona State University)
• Héctor Martínez Alonso (INRIA/University Paris Diderot)
• Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan)
• Smaranda Muresan (Columbia University)
• Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
• Naoaki Okazaki (Tohoku University)
• Miles Osborne (Bloomberg)
• Ellie Pavlick (University of Pennsylvania)
• Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro (University of Pennsylvania)
• Will Radford (Hugo AI)
• Afshin Rahimi (The University of Melbourne)
• Shourya Roy (Xerox Research)
• Alla Rozovskaya (City University of New York)
• Derek Ruths (McGill University)
• Andrew Schwartz (Stony Brook University)
• Djamé Seddah (University Paris-Sorbonne)
• Richard Sproat (Google Research)
• Anders Søgaard (University of Copenhagen)
• Benjamin Strauss (The Ohio State University)
• Jeniya Tabassum (The Ohio State University)
• Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Research)
• Marlies van der Wees (University of Amsterdam)
• Svitlana Volkova (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
• Byron C. Wallace (University of Texas at Austin)
• Xiaojun Wan (Peking University)
• Jun-Ming Xu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Diyi Yang (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Yi Yang (Georgia Tech)
• Guido Zarrella (MITRE)
• Ming Zhou (Microsoft Research)

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