1. Computational Intelligence for Big Social Data Analysis
As the Web rapidly evolves, Web users are evolving with it. In an era of social connectedness, people are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about interacting, sharing, and collaborating through social networks, online communities, blogs, Wikis, and other online collaborative media. In recent years, this collective intelligence has spread to many different areas, with particular focus on fields related to everyday life such as commerce, tourism, education, and health, causing the size of the Social Web to expand exponentially. The opportunity to capture the opinions of the general public about social events, political movements, company strategies, marketing campaigns, and product preferences has raised growing interest both within the scientific community, leading to many exciting open challenges, as well as in the business world, due to the remarkable benefits to be had from marketing and financial market prediction. The main aim of this Special Session is to explore the new frontiers of big data computing for opinion mining and sentiment analysis through computational intelligence techniques, in order to more efficiently retrieve and extract social information from the Web.
2. Topics of Interest
The Special Session aims to provide an international forum for researchers in the field of big data computing for opinion mining and sentiment analysis to share information on their latest investigations in social information retrieval and their applications both in academic research areas and industrial sectors. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Computational intelligence for sentiment mining
• Concept-level sentiment analysis
• Biologically-inspired opinion mining
• Sentiment identification & classification
• Association rule learning for opinion mining
• Time evolving opinion & sentiment analysis
• Multi-modal sentiment analysis
• Multi-domain & cross-domain evaluation
• Knowledge base construction & integration with opinion analysis
• Transfer learning of opinion & sentiment with knowledge bases
• Sentiment topic detection & trend discovery
• Social ranking
• Social network analysis
• Opinion spam detection
3. Aims and Outcomes
Computational Intelligence for Big Social Data Analysis is a Special Session that aims to motivate researchers and practitioners from multidisciplinary fields to enhance the development of novel opinion mining and sentiment analysis techniques under the umbrella of computational intelligence and big data computing. The aim of this Special Session is to bring these two complementary groups together across the disciplinary divide for possibly the very first time, exploring the new frontiers of opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The short-term outcomes of Special Session include fruitful discussions on the emerging challenges in these fields, inspiration for multidisciplinary theories and approaches and motivations for interesting applications. The long-term outcomes include fostering future research directions, publishing high quality papers, attracting new researchers to these fields and concrete solutions to existing social information retrieval problems. The Special Session also aims to attract researchers from industry community as it covers research efforts for the development of applications in fields such as commerce, tourism, education, and health.
4. Relevance
WCCI-2016 is a global event bringing together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, and business experts working on making sense of the data contained in the Web. In this context, opinion mining and sentiment analysis have become increasingly important subtasks in recent years. However, there are still many challenges including social information understanding and integration. For these reasons, we believe this Special Session is strongly relevant to WCCI-2016.