Analyzing Microtext: Papers from the 2013 AAAI Spring Symposium
Preface
Microtext is short snippets of text found in many modes of communication:
microblogs (such as, Twitter, Plurk), Short Message Streams (SMS), chat (such
as, instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat), and transcribed conversations (for
example, FBI hostage negotiations). Microtext often has the characteristics of
informality, brevity, varied grammar, frequent misspellings (both accidental
and purposeful), and usage of abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons. With
the more conversational forms of microtext such as multiparticipant chat
there are also entangled conversation threads. These characteristics create
many difficulties for automatically analyzing and understanding microtext,
often causing traditional NLP techniques to fail. Research on microtext is
becoming increasingly necessary given the explosion of on-line microtext language. Yet very few suitable tools have been developed for analyzing it. Also,
there are few sufficiently large publicly-available data sets (such as the Twitter
corpus). Currently, most NLP tools are designed to deal with grammatical,
properly spelled and punctuated language corpora. However, the reality is that
a vast portion of online data does not conform to the canons of standard
grammar and spelling. This symposium provides a multi-day forum to bring
together researchers from different communities who have an interest in analyzing microtext: artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval, linguistics, human-computer interaction, education, and the social sciences. It provides enough time for the different communities to present their perspectives and methodologies, to learn one another's terminology and techniques, and to begin to form connections that will
hopefully lead to fruitful collaborations. This symposium includes invited
talks, paper presentations (oral and poster), panels, and discussions.
The organizers received a surprisingly large number of submissions for presentations; of these, 16 were accepted with a 67% acceptance rate. The organizers
would like to express their thanks to all paper reviewers: David Aha (Naval
Research Laboratory), Kyle Dent (PARC), Mark Drezde (Johns Hopkins
University), Andrew Duchon (Aptima), Jeffrey Ellen (SPAWAR-PACIFIC),
Micha Elsner (University of Edinburgh), Jennifer Foster (Dublin City
University), Fei Liu (Bosch Research), Sofus Macskassy (USC Information
Sciences Institute), Don Metzler (Yahoo! Inc.), Leora Morgenstern (Science
Applications International Corporation), Jim Nagy (Air Force Research
Laboratory), Douglas Oard (University of Maryland, College Park), Sowmya
Ramachandran (Stottler Henke Inc.), Alan Ritter (University of Washington),
Sara Owsley Sood (Pomona College), Joel Young (Naval Postgraduate School).
– Eduard Hovy, Vita Markman, Craig Martell, and David Uthus
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