Cocea, Mihaela

Gaber, Mohamed Medhat

Goker, Ayse

Wiratunga, Nirmalie

English

Name not available

Introduction to the proceedings of the BCS SGAI
Workshop on Social Media Analysis 2013
Mihaela Cocea1, Mohamed Gaber2, Nirmalie Wiratunga2, and Ayse Go¨ker2
1 School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, UK
mihaela.cocea@port.ac.uk
2 School of Computing & Digital Media,
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
{m.gaber1, n.wiratunga, a.s.goker}@rgu.ac.uk
Social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube continue
to share user-generated content on a massive scale. Users attempting to find relevant in-
formation within such vast and dynamic volumes risk being overwhelmed. In response,
efforts are being made to develop new tools and methods that help users make sense of
and make use of social media sites. In this workshop we will bring together commercial
and academic researchers to discuss these issues, and explore the challenges for social
media mining.
The current expansion of social media leads to masses of affective data related to
peoples emotions, sentiments and opinions. Knowledge discovery from such data is an
emerging area of research in the past few years, with a potential number of applications
of paramount importance to business organisations, individual users and governments.
Data mining and machine learning techniques are used to discover knowledge from
various types of affective data such as ratings, text or browsing data. Sentiment analysis
techniques have grown tremendously over the last few years, addressing applications of
paramount importance. Obama’s presidential election campaign and Gap logo change
are two of these examples. Business organisations, individuals and governments are
keen on extracting what people think of a particular product, a newly introduced
governmental policy, etc. Applications are growing rapidly and so are the techniques.
However, the gap between techniques and applications is still an issue that needs to be
addressed.
All submitted papers received two or three review reports from Program Committee
members. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, 4 full papers have been se-
lected for publication and presentation at BCS SGAI 2013. The selected papers address
a variety of research themes, ranging from the importance of domain-specific lexicons
when analysing social media text to theme extraction and combining text with multi-
media sources for opinion mining.
The paper “Domain-Based Lexicon Enhancement for Sentiment Analysis” by
Aminu Muhammad, Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert Lothian and Richard Glassey pro-
pose an approach for learning a domain-focused sentiment lexicon. They show that
by combining a general lexicon with a domain-focused one better results are obtained
for sentiment analysis on Twitter text.
The paper “Towards Passive Political Opinion Polling using Twitter” by Nicholas A.
Thapen and Moustafa M. Ghanem investigated automatic analysis of political tweets.
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They looked at sentiment analysis of tweets from UK members of parliament towards
the main political parties, as well as voters’ tweets analysis for inferring voting inten-
tions. In addition, they conducted an automatic identification of key topics discussed by
members of parliament and voters.
The paper “Mining Newsworthy Topics from Social Media” by Carlos Martin,
David Corney, Ayse Go¨ker, and Andrew MacFarlane explore the real-time detection
of newsworthy stories by looking at “bursts” of phrases. This allows the identification
of emerging topics. An interesting evaluation methods is used, where the ground truth
is established from news stories that were published in the mainstream media, thus en-
suring their newsworthiness.
The paper “Multimodal Sentiment Analysis of Social Media” by Diana Maynard,
David Dupplaw, and Jonathon Hare combines mining of text and of multimedia sources
such as images and videos for opinion mining. The analysis of multimedia content
complements the opinion extraction from text by resolving ambiguity and providing
contextual information.
The papers in these proceedings addressed various aspects of social media analysis,
covering different techniques for analysis, as well as different applications. They illus-
trate the advancement of research in this field and the refinement of techniques to suit
the application domains.
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Introduction to the proceedings of the BCS SGAI Workshop on Social Media Analysis 2013

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Introduction to the proceedings of the BCS SGAI Workshop on Social Media Analysis 2013

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