Background and envisaged scope
Starting with reviews on products on e-commerce sites and ending with the emotional effect present in or intended by media coverage, research in automatic Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis as well as explicit and implicit Emotion Detection and Classification has flourished in the past years. The importance of the field has been proven by the high number of approaches proposed in research in the past decade, as well as by the interest it generated in other disciplines, such as Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Marketing, Crisis Management & Digital Humanities. In Medicine, insights from the field can provide actionable insights into the efficacy of public health messaging. Since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has dominated the news headlines all around the world and evoked a variety of emotions amongst the general public. Understanding these emotions not only gives insights into the way the public responds to the COVID-19 pandemic in itself and to the media coverage of the disease, but might help to encourage health promotion measures.
Topics of interest
Building on previous editions, the aim of WASSA 2021 is to bring together researchers working on Subjectivity, Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Detection and Classification and their applications to other NLP or real world tasks (e.g. public health messaging, fake news, media impact analysis) and researchers working on interdisciplinary aspects of affect computation from text. We strongly encourage submissions that tackle sentiment or emotion detection and classification in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this edition, we encourage the submission of long and short research and demo papers including, but not restricted to the following topics:
- Public sentiments and communication patterns of public health emergencies, e.g. COVID-19
- Resources for subjectivity, sentiment, emotion and social media analysis
- Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, aggregation and summarization
- Trend detection in social media using subjectivity, sentiment and emotion analysis
- Humor, Irony and Sarcasm detection
- The role of emotion and affective phenomena in dis/misinformation
- Online reputation management
- Aspect and topic-based sentiment analysis
- Transfer learning for domain, language and genre portability of sentiment analysis
- Modelling commonsense knowledge for subjectivity, sentiment or emotion analysis
- Improvement of NLP tasks using subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis
- Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of subjectivity and/or sentiment analysis
- Detecting and quantifying the emotional effect of factual arguments
- Application of theories from other related fields to subjectivity and sentiment analysis
- Implicit sentiment and bias analysis in newswire text
- Multimodal emotion detection and classification
Submissions
At WASSA 2021, we will accept two types of submissions: long and short papers.
- Long papers: long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, with any number of additional pages of references or annexes, and will be presented orally.
- Short papers: short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, with two (2) additional pages of references or annexes, and will be presented either orally or as a poster.
Papers for WASSA should be submitted using the EACL 2021 Style Files. Download the LaTeX template.
Additionally, papers from the shared task will be presented either orally or as posters.
Important data
- Submission deadline (updated): January 28, 2021
- Notification: February 18, 2021
- Camera-ready deadline: March 1, 2021
- Workshop date: To be confirmed (April 19 or 20, 2021)
Invited speaker
Prof. Lyle Ungar from the University of Pennsylvania agreed to be our invited speaker at WASSA2021. He will talk about his interdisciplinary work on measuring psychological well-being and physical health based on the analysis of language in the framework of the World Well-Being Project.
Shared task at WASSA 2021
The shared task at WASSA 2021 will be on identifying and classifying comments on empathy. More details on the WASSA 2021 website.
Development data has been released 22 December 2020 and the evaluation period will take place mid February 2021.
Organizers
- Alexandra Balahur, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Directorate I, Text and
Data Mining Unit, alexandra.balahur [at] ec.europa.eu - Orphee De Clercq, LT3 Language and Translation Technology Team, Ghent University,
orphee.declercq [at] ugent.be - João Sedoc, Technology, Operations, and Statistics department, New York University,
jsedoc [at] stern.nyu.edu - Valentin Barriere, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Directorate I, Text and
Data Mining Unit, valentin.barriere [at] ec.europa.eu - Shabnam Tafreshi, George Washington University, shabnamt [at] email.gwu.edu
- Veronique Hoste, LT3 Language and Translation Technology Team, Ghent University,
veronique.hoste [at] ugent.be - Sven Buechel, Language and Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, sven.buechel [at] uni-jena.de
Program Committee
- Barbara Plank – IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Carlo Strapparava – Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
- Carlos A. Iglesias -- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Charlie Welch – University of Michigan, U.S.A
- Constantin Orasan - University of Surrey, U.K.
- Cristina Bosco - University of Torino, Italy
- Cynthia Van Hee – Ghent University, Belgium.
- Dan Tufis - RACAI, Romania
- Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro – Amazon, U.S.A.
- Edison Marrese-Taylor - University of Tokyo, Japan
- Els Lefever – Ghent University, Belgium.
- Erik Cambria - Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Felipe Bravo-Marquez - University of Waikato, New Zealand
- Fermin Cruz Mata - University of Seville, Spain
- Gilles Jacobs– Ghent University, Belgium.
- Jeremy Barnes - University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
- Isa Maks - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Josef Steinberger - West Bohemia University Prague, The Czech Republic
- Karo Moilanen – University of Oxford, U.K.
- Laura Ana Maria Oberländer – University of Stuttgart, Germany
- Lorenzo Gatti - University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Lingjia Deng - University of Pittsburg, U.S.A.
- Luna De Bruyne – Ghent University, Belgium.
- Malvina Nissim - University of Groningen, The Netherlands
- Manfred Klenner - University of Zuerich, Switzerland
- Michael Gamon – Microsoft, U.S.A.
- Michael Wiegand - Saarland University, Germany
- Mike Thelwall - University of Wolverhampton, U.K
- Montse Cuadros - Vicomtech, Spain
- Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR Pisa, Italy
- Paolo Rosso - Technical University of Valencia, Spain
- Piek Vossen - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Roman Klinger – University of Stuttgart, Germany
- Ruben Izquierdo Bevia – Nuance, Spain
- Saif M. Mohammad – National Research Council Canada, Canada
- Sabine Bergler - Concordia University, Canada
- Sven Buechel – University of Jena, Germany
- Taras Zagibalov -- Brantwatch, U.K.
- Tony Veale - University College Dublin, Ireland
- Viktor Pekar - University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
- Viviana Patti - University of Torino, Italy