SoAPS 2018 - International Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search (SoAPS)

Modern society is overwhelmed and characterized by exhausting social interactions at all levels. A variety of communication systems continuously allows this type of interaction both implicitly and explicitly. Therefore, social aspects have become of primary importance, by involving personal and working life on a continuous basis. For this reason, infinite traces are intentionally or involuntarily entrusted to the digital world. Social media platforms have become powerful tools to collect the preferences of the users and get to know them more, but are just one of the possibilities that we should exploit. Indeed, in order to build profiles about what the users like or dislike, a system does not only have to rely on explicitly given preferences (e.g., ratings) or on implicitly collected data (e.g., from the browsing sessions). In the middle, there lie opinions and preferences expressed through likes, textual comments, posted content, direct messages, and speech transcriptions. Being able to exploit social aspects to mine user behavior and extract additional information leads to improvements in the accuracy of personalization and search technologies, and to better targeted services to the users. In this workshop, we aim to collect novel ideas in this field and to provide a common ground for researchers working in this area.