SAAL 2012 - The International Special Session on Sentiment Analysis for Asian Languages

Sentiment Analysis for Asian Languages
[Session Chairs]:Amitava Das (amitava.santu-AT-gmail.com) [http://www.amitavadas.com]
[Scope]: The Sentiment Analysis research becomes quite mature after a few decade of its cultivation. As a result, a few systems like Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tool (http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/), TweetFeel (http://www.tweetfeel.com/) are available in the World Wide Web since last few years but still more research efforts are necessary to meet the multilingual user satisfaction level and social need.
In recent times, the research activities in the areas of Sentiment Analysis from natural language texts are gaining attention at the crossroad of Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval. The reason may be the huge amount of available text data in the Social Web in the forms of news, reviews, blogs, chats and even twitter. Regular research papers continue to be published in reputed conferences like ACL, EMNLP or COLING. There have been an ample number of research efforts in shared tasks such as SemEval 2007 Task#14: Affective Text, TAC 2008 Opinion Summarization task, TREC-BLOG tracks since 2006 and relevant NTCIR tracks since 6th NTCIR aimed to focus on different issues of opinion and emotion analysis. Several communities from sentiment analysis have engaged themselves to conduct relevant conferences, e.g., Affective Computing and Intelligent Interfaces (ACII) in 2009 and 2011 and workshops such as “Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text” in COLING-ACL 2006, “Sentiment Analysis - Emotion, Metaphor, Ontology and Terminology (EMOT)” in LREC 2008, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis (WOMSA) 2009, “Topic-Sentiment Analysis for Mass Opinion Measurement (TSA)” in CIKM 2009, “Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text” in NAACL 2010, Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis (WASSA) in ECAI 2010 and in ACL 2011, FLAIRS 2011 special track on “Affect Computing” and very recently ICDM SENTIRE 2011 Sentiment Eliciation from Natural Text for Information Retrieval and Extraction and so on.
Till date majority of the Sentiment Analysis research has been focused on the English language. But, the recent study shows that non-native English speakers support the growing use of the Internet1. Although a few isolated research endeavors have been noticed by a few research groups for Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Thai and for other Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali, Hindi etc. but still more and more research efforts are required to meet the demands of the real life multilingual environment. In the present scenario, this special session aims to provide a platform to the Asian Sentiment Analysis researchers for discussing the Sentiment Analysis challenges and solutions methodologies for their respective languages.
Natural Language Processing research endeavor primarily depends on the availability of resources like corpus, lexicon etc. For that very reason, the Sentiment Analysis research for Asian languages is still striving as for the scarcity of resources like Sentiment Lexicon or Corpus. Primarily, the expected issues for the present special session would be the generation of Sentiment resources for the Asian languages. Secondly this special session would like to encourage the cultivation of Sentiment analysis research by discussing the challenges and methodologies for the rich morpho-syntactic Asian languages.
Definitely this is a long term commitment and goal, which cannot be achieved through a single session, finally, our plan is to make a common portal by which the Asian researchers can access and share the Sentiment Analysis resources for their own languages. We strongly recommend each and every active Asian Sentiment Analysis research group to contribute their research efforts in this special session and make the session as a successful event.
Topics of Interest but not Limited to:
Generation of Sentiment Analysis Resources for Asian Languages, including Corpus and Annotation, Lexicons
New methodologies of Sentiment Analysis for Asian Languages
Evaluation methodologies
Applications of Sentiment Analysis for Asian Languages
Sentiment Search Engines for Asian Languages
Anything Else Relates Sentiment Analysis and Asian Languages
For more details, please visit the website: http://www.amitavadas.com/SAAL/index.html