Session details: NLPIT'16

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Informal Text (NLPIT), associated with WWW 2016.The rapid growth of Internet usage in the last two decades adds new challenges to understand the informal user generated content (UGC) on the Internet. Textual UGC refers to textual posts on social media, blogs, emails, chat conversations, instant messages, forums, reviews, or advertisements that are created by endusers of an online system. A large portion of language used on textual UGC is informal. Informal text is the style of writing that disregards language grammars and uses a mixture of abbreviations and context dependent terms. The straightforward application of state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing approaches on informal text typically results in a significantly degraded performance due to the following reasons: the lack of sentence structure; the lack of enough context required; the seldom entities involved; the noisy sparse contents of users' contributions; and the untrusted facts contained.The NLPIT workshop hopes to bring opportunities and challenges involved in informal text processing under the attention of researchers. In particular, we are interested in discussing informal text modeling, normalization, mining, and understanding in addition to various application areas in which UGC is involved.The workshop is a follow-up of the first NLPIT workshop that was held in conjunction with ICWE: the International Conference on Web Engineering held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 23rd to 26th of July 2015.The call for papers attracted submissions from 15 different countries. The program committee reviewed and accepted the following: Venue or Track: Reviewed - 16 Accepted - 6.The workshop started with a keynote presentation given by Raphael Troncy from EURECOM, France entitled Linking Entities for Enriching and Structuring Social Media Content. The keynote is followed by 6 research presentations. The common theme of the research presentations is, analogous to the first edition of NLPIT, NLP for a multitude of languages. Among them the papers and presentations feature Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Yoruba (West Africa), and various variations of English.