I am co-organizing an LREC work­shop on Lan­guage Engi­neer­ing for Online Rep­u­ta­tion Management.

The LREC 2012 work­shop on Lan­guage Engi­neer­ing for Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment intends to bring together the Lan­guage Engi­neer­ing com­mu­nity (includ­ing researchers and devel­op­ers) with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment indus­try, a fast-growing sec­tor which poses chal­leng­ing demands to text min­ing tech­nolo­gies. The goal is to estab­lish a five-year roadmap on the topic, focus­ing on what lan­guage tech­nolo­gies are required to get there in terms of resources, algo­rithms and applications.

Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment deals with the image that online media project about indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions. The grow­ing rel­e­vance of social media and the speed at which facts and opin­ions travel in microblog­ging net­works make online rep­u­ta­tion an essen­tial part of a company’s pub­lic relations.

While tra­di­tional rep­u­ta­tion analy­sis was based mostly on man­ual analy­sis (clip­ping from media, sur­veys, etc.), the key value from online media comes from the abil­ity of pro­cess­ing, under­stand­ing and aggre­gat­ing poten­tially huge streams of facts and opin­ions about a com­pany or indi­vid­ual. Infor­ma­tion to be mined includes answers to ques­tions such as: What is the gen­eral state of opin­ion about a company/individual in online media? What are its per­ceived strengths and weak­nesses, as com­pared to its peers/competitors? How is the com­pany posi­tioned with respect to its strate­gic mar­ket? Can incom­ing threats to its rep­u­ta­tion be detected early enough to be neu­tral­ized before they effec­tively affect reputation?

In this con­text, Nat­ural Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing plays a key, enabling role, and we are already wit­ness­ing an unprece­dented demand for text min­ing soft­ware in this area. Note that, while the area of opin­ion min­ing has made sig­nif­i­cant advances in the last few years, most tan­gi­ble progress has been focused on prod­ucts. How­ever, min­ing and under­stand­ing opin­ions about com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als is, in gen­eral, a much harder and less under­stood problem.

The aim of this work­shop is to bring together the Lan­guage Engi­neer­ing com­mu­nity (includ­ing researchers and devel­op­ers) with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment indus­try, with the ulti­mate goal of estab­lish­ing a five-year roadmap on the topic, and a descrip­tion of the lan­guage tech­nolo­gies required to get there in terms of resources, algo­rithms and applications.

With this pur­pose in mind, the work­shop will wel­come both research papers and posi­tion state­ments from indus­try and acad­e­mia. The agenda for the event will include both pre­sen­ta­tions (from accepted sub­mis­sions and selected invited speak­ers) and a col­lab­o­ra­tive dis­cus­sion to sketch a roadmap for Lan­guage Engi­neer­ing in Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment. The EU project Limo­sine (start­ing Novem­ber 2011) will be used as a fund­ing instru­ment to ensure that par­tic­i­pa­tion is rep­re­sen­ta­tive and key play­ers are engaged in the work­shop. The work­shop is held in coor­di­na­tion with the RepLab ini­tia­tive, a CLEF 2012 eval­u­a­tion ini­tia­tive for sys­tems deal­ing with Online Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment challenges.

Note that the dead­line is extended: 22 Feb­ru­ary 2012. See the web­site for more information.