IntroductionWelcome to the COLING 2014 Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP). SocialNLP is a new inter-disciplinary area of natural language processing (NLP) and social computing. We consider three plausible directions of SocialNLP: (1) addressing issues in social computing using NLP techniques; (2) solving NLP problems using information from social networks or social media; and (3) handling new problems related to both social computing and natural language processing.Through this workshop, we anticipate to provide a platform for research outcome presentation and head-to-head discussion in the area of SocialNLP, with the hope to combine the insight and experience of prominent researchers from both NLP and social computing domains to contribute to the area of SocialNLP jointly. Also, selected and expanded versions of papers presented at SocialNLP will be published in two follow-on Special Issues of Springer Cognitive Computation (CogComp) and the International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (IJCLCLP).The submissions to this year's workshop were again of high quality and we had a competitive selection process. We received 18 submissions, and due to a rigorous review process, we only accepted 6 of them. Thus the acceptance rate was 33%. We also have 2 invited papers. The workshop papers cover a broad range of SocialNLP-related topics, such as aspect extraction, multi-lingual sentiment analysis, sentiment feature selection, online rating prediction, sentiment sequence recognition, automatic identification, verbal behavior and persuasiveness analysis, and user classification. We had a total of 18 reviewers. We warmly thank our PC members for the timely reviews and constructive comments.
AbstractIn ironic texts what is literally said is usually negated, and in absence of an explicit negation marker. This makes social computing quite challenging. Detecting irony is very much important for NLP tasks such as polarity classification, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, or reputation analysis. There is a growing interest from the research community in investigating the impact of irony on polarity classification and sentiment analysis. A tasks will be organised at SemEval in 2015 on Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter (http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2015/task11). What are the linguistic patterns that users employ in social media in order to try to be ironic in just maybe 140 characters? Linguistic devices that go beyond positive or negative polarity such as ambiguity, incongruity, unexpectedness and emotional contexts have an important role as triggers of irony. In the talk I will describe how irony is employed in social media texts (Twitter, Amazon, Facebook etc.) and what are the recent stateof-the-art attempts for its automatic detection. At the end of the talk, I will address also the even more challenging and fine-grained problem of distinguishing among irony, sarcasm and satire: e.g. If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I...