Proceedings of the first international workshop on Social media retrieval and analysis

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the SoMeRA 2014: International Workshop on Social Media Retrieval and Analysis, co-located with SIGIR 2014 in Gold Coast, Australia. The amount of user-generated data (including content and contextual information of the users) has been spiraling during the past few years. Social media are fundamentally changing the way how we communicate. Nowadays, people create, share, and consume a huge number of multimedia material on the web and in particular on social platforms. The faster the growth of these corpora, the harder it gets for the individual to find the media documents which satisfy a particular information need. When it comes to multimedia material in particular, the users might also exhibit an entertainment need, which may involve aspects of novelty, serendipity, familiarity, or popularity. However, current retrieval, recommendation, and browsing techniques often fall short to deal with user-generated data of various kinds (audio, image, video, text, contextual, etc.), especially on a larger scale. Satisfying the information- or entertainment need of users in social media data requires a comprehensive understanding of them, which can be gained to some extent by means of social media analysis and -mining. Corresponding user models which are built from this knowledge will improve retrieval and recommendation in social media, going far beyond text-based search which is still the most common paradigm. The gained knowledge also enables intelligently informed and enriched applications in various media domains. The purpose of SoMeRA 2014 is to bring together researchers of different domains who are involved in social media analysis, mining, and retrieval, for instance, experts in multimedia, recommender systems, and user modeling. This is reflected by the 19 submissions received that cover topics as diverse as multimedia retrieval and exploration, user-aware recommender systems, network analysis, event detection, and computational linguistics in social media. Out of these, we selected the most outstanding works to be presented at the workshop, which features 5 oral and 8 poster presentations. In addition, the program includes a keynote speech by Prof. Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore, entitled "From Social Media Data to Actionable Analytics".