Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Computational Approaches to Figurative Language

Computational Approaches to Figurative Language - looks like a really interesting event, and certainly of interest to anyone working in sentiment/polarity/opinion mining.

Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, personification, simile among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. It is an effective apparatus to heighten effect and convey various meanings, such as humor, irony, sarcasm, affection, etc. Figurative language can be found not only in fiction, but also in everyday speech, newspaper articles, research papers, and even technical reports. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, and question answering. Resolution of this problem involves both a solid understanding of the distinction between literal and non-literal language and the development of effective computational models that can make the appropriate semantic interpretation automatically.

IJCAI-2007 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data

The site for this new workshop has just gone up:  IJCAI-2007 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data.

Noisy unstructured text data is found in informal settings such as online chat, SMS, emails, message boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and web pages. Also, text produced by processing spontaneous speech, printed text, handwritten text contains processing noise. Text produced under such circumstances is typically highly noisy containing spelling errors, abbreviations, non-standard words, false starts, repetitions, missing punctuations, missing case information, pause filling words such as “um” and “uh.” Such text can be seen in large amounts in contact centers, on-line chat rooms, OCRed text documents, SMS corpus etc. The theme of the IJCAI 2007 Conference is "AI and its benefits to society." In keeping with this theme, this workshop proposes to look at text analytics of highly noisy text that is produced in such everyday applications in society.

I'm excited to be involved.

Recent History

Some recent history: I just returned from Japan where I attended the annual WWW conference. I also co-chaired a workshop on weblogs (the Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems  to be exact). The workshop was a great experience. I had been involved as a co-chair the year before but was not able to make it to the conference. This year we were fortunate enough to have Ethan Zuckerman as our invited speaker. I met Ethan a while back (virtually met that is) due to a shared interest in maps, stats and blogs. Part of Ethan's work studies the relationships between different media types and the places that they publish on (see his page on Global Attention Profiles).