[Asis-l] ECIR Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search (SoAPS 2018)

[Ludovico Boratto]

*Workshop on Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search
(SoAPS 2018)*
*In conjunction with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval
(ECIR 2018)*
Grenoble France - March 26, 2018


*CALL FOR PAPERS*
In order to improve the web experience of the users, classic
personalization technologies (e.g., recommender systems) and search engines
usually rely on static schemes. Indeed, users are allowed to express
ratings in a fixed range of values for a given catalogue of products, or to
express a query that usually returns the same set of webpages/products for
all the users.
With the advent of communication systems (social media platforms, instant
messaging systems, speech recognition and transcription tools, etc.), users
have been allowed to create new content and to express opinions and
preferences in new forms (e.g., likes, textual comments, and audio
feedbacks). Moreover, the social interactions can provide information on
who influences whom. Being able to mine usage and collaboration patterns
that arise thanks to social aspects and to analyze the collective
cooperations, opens new frontiers in the generation of personalization
services and in the improvement of search engines. Moreover, recent
technological advances, such as deep learning, are able to provide a
context to the analyzed data (e.g., word embeddings provide a vector
representation of the words in a corpus, considering the context in which a
word has been used).
Our workshop will solicit contributions in all topics related to employing
social aspects for personalization and search purposes, focused (but not
limited) to the following list:
- Recommender systems
- Search and tagging
- Query expansion
- User modeling and profiling
- Advertising and ad targeting
- Content classification, categorization, and clustering
- Using social network features/community detection algorithms for
personalization and search purposes
- Employing speech transcription in personalization and search
- Building benchmarking datasets
- Novel evaluation methodologies in the social context

*IMPORTANT DATES*

   - Paper submission: January 15, 2018
   - Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2018
   - Camera-ready version: February 15, 2018
   - Workshop date: March 26, 2018


*TYPES OF CONTRIBUTIONS*
We will consider three different submission types, all in the LNCS format
<http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0>: regular (14
pages), short (8 pages) and extended abstracts (4 pages).
*Research and position papers* (regular or short) should be clearly placed
with respect to the state of the art and state the contribution of the
proposal in the domain of application, even if presenting preliminary
results. In particular, research papers should describe the methodology in
detail, experiments should be repeatable, and a comparison with the
existing approaches in the literature should be made where possible.
*Position papers* (short) should introduce novel point of views in the
workshop topics or summarize the experience of a researcher or a group in
the field.
*Practice and experience reports* (short) should present in detail the
real-world scenarios in which social aspects are employed for
personalization and search purposes.
*Demo proposals* (extended abstract) should present the details of a
prototype or complete application that employs social aspects for
personalization and search purposes. The systems will be demonstrated to
the workshop attendees.

The reviewing process will be coordinated by the organizers. Each paper
will receive three reviews: two externals to the organizing committee and
one internal. The external reviewers will be contacted according to their
expertise in the paper topic.

*PROCEEDINGS*
All accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website together
with the material generated during the meeting.
The SoAPS 2018 Workshop proceedings will also be available in a volume
(whose details will be given soon), and indexed on DBLP and Scopus.
Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version in
a journal special issue.

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES*
All submission must be written in English and follow the ECIR paper
guidelines <http://irsg.bcs.org/proceedings/ECIR_Draft_Guidelines.pdf>. All
papers must be formatted according to the LNCS format style.

Papers should be submitted in PDF format, electronically, using the
EasyChair submission system. Details will be given soon.

*INVITED SPEAKER*
TBA

*CONTACTS*
Website: http://soaps.di.uniroma1.it/
For general enquires regarding the workshop, send an email to both the
organizers at ludovico.boratto at acm.org, stilo at di.uniroma1.it

*ORGANIZERS*
Ludovico Boratto (EURECAT, Spain)
Giovanni Stilo (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)