First Call for Participation and Workshop Organisation

Eighth Biennial Summer School
EUROLAN 2007: "Semantics, Opinion and Sentiment in Text"
http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/

July 23 - August 3, 2007

Faculty of Computer Science
"Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
*****************************************

Want to learn to seize the difference between what a text explicitly conveys and what is hidden behind its words? To know how sentiments and emotions are expressed by authors, how could they be identified and how to make use of them in writings? About the "technologies" that make you smile? Then...

The EUROLAN 2007 Summer School offers two weeks of intensive study in the emerging areas of sentiment and opinion analysis complementing deep semantic analysis, and their applications to discourse and dialogue. The Summer School will cover topics relevant to the new Web 2.0, with lectures covering the application of Natural Language Processing to blogs, wikis, etc.

Invited lecturers will include internationally known researchers in the field. Lectures will consist of half- and full-day seminars, together with hands-on labs to provide students with in-depth understanding and experience.

Topics to be covered include the following:

   * automatic and semi-automatic discovery of subjectivity indicators
   * extracting sentiments from unstructured text
   * tracking opinions over time
   * computational approaches to humor recognition and generation
   * annotation for deep semantics, sentiment, and subjectivity
   * subjectivity/sentiment and analysis of discourse and dialogue
   * subjectivity and sentiment analysis in blogs
   * discourse and dialogue in blogs
   * lexical semantics in the Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, etc.)
   * attribution of opinion and sentiment
   * applications of opinion and sentiment analysis

EUROLAN 2007 Professors (preliminary list):

   * Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
   * Claire Gardent, LORIA, CNRS, Nancy, France
   * Udo Hahn, Jena University, Germany
   * Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
   * Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
   * Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
   * Enrico Motta, Open University, UK
   * Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc., Boulder, USA
   * Livia Polanyi, Powerset Inc., San Francisco, USA
   * James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA  (to be confirmed)
   * Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
   * Carlo Strapparava, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
   * Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
   * Jan Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
   * Mickael Zock, University of Provence, Marseille, France


The venue of EUROLAN 2007 is Iasi, Romania, the capital city of the historical region of Moldavia.

The organizers are planning a one or one-and-a-half days excursion to the Northern part of the Romanian province of Moldavia, including the famous monasteries from Bucovina or Neamt.

Since its inception in 1993, the EUROLAN summer schools have gained a high reputation in the scientific community devoted to different areas of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. They are well known also for the degree of camaraderie that develops among students and professors - just ask any previous participant about his sentiments and opinions! Students in the EUROLAN schools learn a lot, while also having much fun during the everyday social events.

The school will host two satellite events:

1. A Doctoral Consortium - http://eurolan.info.uaic.ro/2007/DC/
(call to be issued soon)
Organisers:
   * Corina Forascu, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
   * Oana Postolache, ISI - University of Southern California, USA
   * Georgiana Puscasu, University of Wolverhampton, UK
   * Cristina Vertan, University of Hamburg, Germany

2. An Workshop on a theme linked to the School's topic (to be announced after February 5)

EUROLAN-2007 welcomes proposals for a workshop to be organised on a theme related to that of the School. The workshop will be held in three consecutive evenings during the School's period, in the same venue, and is intended mainly to participants to the School for presenting their own or project-based team research. Proposals for the workshop should contain: the title, the list of organisers, the Program Committee, a budget proving self-support (mainly for printing the proceedings), and any special requirements for technical needs. Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail, in rtf or plain ASCII text, till 5 February 2007 to one of the addresses: dcristea@info.uaic.ro or corinfor@info.uaic.ro.

Program Committee:

   * Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
   * Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
   * Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
   * Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
   * Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania


Organising Committee: (local co-chairs)

   * Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
   * Corina Forascu, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
   * Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania

Welcome to EUROLAN 2007!