The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is holding its 2006 Spring Symposium Series at Stanford, March 27-29. One of the eight scheduled symposia is Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs, and submissions are due in ten days, by Friday, October 7.
Here's the start of the call for papers:
Weblogs are web pages which provide unedited, highly opinionated personal commentary. Often a weblog (also referred to as blog) is a chronological sequence of entries which include hyperlinks to other resources. A blog is conveniently maintained and published with authoring tools.
The blogosphere as a whole can be exploited for outreach opinion formation, maintaining online communities, supporting knowledge management within large global collaborative environments, monitoring reactions to public events and is seen as the upcoming alternative to the mass media.
Semantic analysis of blogs represents the next challenge in the quest for understanding natural language. Their light content, fragmented topic structure, inconsistent grammar, and vulnerability to spam makes blog analysis extremely challenging when faced with questions like: can the implicit and explicit communities implied by content and link structure be used to determine the relevance and influence of bloggers? Can a blog segment be identified as a summary of a linked story in order to use both as training data for summarization research? Can we determine how information percolates through mass media outlets and blogs? Can blogs with multimedia content be stored in a way that allows us to search across different modalities? Can we find consumer complaints, discover vulnerabilities of products, and predict trends?
If you're interested, read the whole thing. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the organizing committee.
Posted by Mark Liberman at September 27, 2005 12:44 PM