SIGIR 2005 Workshop

Stylistic Analysis Of Text For Information Access

August 19, 2005
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Theme and goals of the workshop

Information management systems have typically focused on the "factual" aspect of content analysis. Other aspects, including pragmatics, opinion, and style, have received much less attention. However, to achieve an adequate understanding of a text, these aspects cannot be ignored.

This workshop will be the first ever to specifically address the automatic analysis and extraction of stylistic aspects of natural language texts for purposes of improving information access. Style may be roughly defined as the 'manner' in which something is expressed, as opposed to the 'content' of a message. Stylistic variation depends on author preferences and competence, familiarity, genre, communicative context, expected characteristics of the intended audience and untold other factors, and it is expressed through subtle variation in frequencies of otherwise insignificant features of a text that, taken together, are understood as stylistic indicators by a particular reader community. Modeling, representing, and utilizing this variation is the business of stylistic analysis.

Useful applications of stylistic analysis abound, including systems for genre-based information retrieval, authorship attribution, plagiarism detection, context-sensitive text or speech generation systems, organizing and retrieving documents based on their writing style, attitude, or sentiment, quality or appropriateness filters for messaging systems, detecting abusive or threatening language, and more.

Style work to date has been stymied by two obstacles. Given the subtlety and complexity of the phenomena, automated learning systems need a considerable amount of (tagged) text before achieving reliable performance. As a result, few theories have been specified and few linguistic resources have been developed to a level where reliable tagging is easy and reliable. Our purpose, therefore, is to bring together people from academia, government, and industry who are interested in exploring core issues regarding the annotation, modeling, mining, and classification of style in text, across a range of text information management applications. The goal, therefore, is to address a rather wide range of issues, from theoretical questions and models about style, through annotation standards and methods, to algorithms for recognizing, clustering, and displaying these aspects. We invite contributions on the broadest possible range of methodological, technical and application-oriented aspects of the use of style in information processing, including but not limited to:

• Style in Theory:
  What is style? How can it be defined? How does it differ from other types of non-topical variation? What are its social characteristics and interpretations? What dimensions of variations do you assume? What is the appropriate level of abstraction for best explanatory power? What linguistic universals of style may be identified?
• Style in Engineering:
  How is style analyzable? What is the appropriate level of abstraction for useful computational purposes? What features are valuable for analysis? How could stylistic information be used for generation or modification of existing information? What issues and solutions exist for cross-lingual style analysis and synthesis?
• Style in Applications:
  What tasks can stylistic information be used for? How do people understand style? Can stylistic information be used profitably e.g. in information access interfaces?
• Style in Research:
  What tools and resources do you use, and can we use them too?

Submission guidelines

We encourage submissions from researchers working on all kinds of style-related problems. Participants are invited to submit research papers, posters abstracts, demonstration proposals, and panel discussion proposals on computational methods for style-related information access. Papers should not exceed 8 pages in length and conform to the ACM Conference style, see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Important dates

Submission deadline: May 20, 2005
Notification of acceptance: June 12, 2005
Camera Ready copy due: July 1, 2005

Organizers

Shlomo Argamon (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Jussi Karlgren (Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
James G. Shanahan (Clairvoyance Corporation)

Program committee

Nasreen AbdulJaleel (Univ. of Massachusetts and Clairvoyance Corp.)
Kevyn Collins-Thompson (Carnegie Mellon University)
Moshe Koppel (Bar-Ilan University)
Elizabeth D. Liddy (Syracuse University)
Gheorghe Muresan (Rutgers University)
Yan Qu (Clairvoyance Corporation)
Anca L. Ralescu (University of Cincinnati)

Hosted by the IIT Laboratory of Linguistic Cognition