FYI: Workshop on Stylistics for Text Retrieval in Practice

Author:	Shlomo Argamon
Linguistic Field(s):	Computational Linguistics Sociolinguistics Text/Corpus Linguistics
FYI Body:	CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Stylistics for Text Retrieval in Practice SIGIR 2006 Workshop Seattle, WA, August 10, 2006 http://www.lingcog.iit.edu/style2006 style2006@sics.se Recent years have seen an increased attention to various aspects of automatic analysis and extraction of stylistic aspects of natural language texts. Style may be roughly defined as the 'manner' in which something is expressed, as opposed to the 'content' of a message. Modelling, representing, explaining, and utilizing variation in the manner of expression is the business of stylistic analysis. This workshop follows four previous successful exploratory events on stylistic analysis and will focus on the practical craft of stylistic analysis in natural language texts. THIS YEAR: BRING A DEMO! Potentially useful applications of stylistic analysis abound, including systems for genre-based information retrieval, authorship attribution, plagiarism detection, context-sensitive text or speech generation systems, organizing and retrieving documents based on their writing style, attitude, or sentiment, quality or appropriateness filters for messaging systems, detecting abusive or threatening language, and more. This year, participants are expected to bring with them a method for applying stylistic analysis to information access tasks. Before lunch, methods will be discussed in session; after lunch, demonstrated in practice. DISCUSSION QUESTION Participants should address the following key challenge question in their participation proposals: WHAT IS A MEANINGFUL "KILLER APP" FOR STYLISTIC TEXT ANALYSIS? and consider the following questions for discussion in session: 1. How does style relate to other forms of non-topical textual variation? 2. What features are best for different style analysis tasks? 3. Is cross-lingual or 'universal' style analysis possible, and if so, how? 4. How might we develop useful shared resources for moving style research forward? SUBMISSION FORMAT Send us a statement (in PDF) of up to five pages describing your research or application with a short description (and screenshots if possible) of the demonstration you plan to show. At the workshop we will discuss and decide on an appropriate forum for a more permanent record of the proceedings. If you would like a speaking slot in the discussion session, you should indicate this in your statement of interest. ORGANIZERS Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute for Computer Science, Sweden Ozlem Uzuner, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA http://www.lingcog.iit.edu/style2006 style2006@sics.se IMPORTANT DATES Expression of interest to participate now! Submission of participation proposals June 1 Notification of acceptance June 14 Program published June 20 Workshop August 10