Adapting Sentiment Lexicons using Contextual Semantics for Twitter Sentiment Analysis

This edition of the Workshop on Semantic Sentiment Analysis (SSA2014) was the first on this topic in the semantic web community. It was organised as a half-day event, co-located with the 11th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2014). Our aim in launching this workshop was twofold: (i) providing a space for proposing and discussing new methods and applications of semantics in sentiment analysis; and (ii) broadening the sentiment analysis community towards the incorporation of semantic features. Semantics have shown to improve precision and accuracy of traditional sentiment analysis methods. The workshop was also linked to the Concept-Level Sentiment Analysis Challenge, where users submitted their practical systems that had to include semantics features to solve different tasks in the sentiment analysis domain. The workshop included oral presentations, a panel session, and an invited talk by Mauro Dragoni, who participated in the semantic sentiment analysis challenge: A Fuzzy System For Semantic Sentiment Analysis, by Mauro Dragoni, Andrea Tettamanzi and Celia Da Costa Pereira. Altogether, SSA2014 received six research paper submissions. From among these submissions, the Program Committee selected four research papers for presentation at the workshop. Additionally, the organisers of each ESWC Workshop were asked to indicate the workshop’s “best paper”. Authors were then invited to submit a revised and extended version of their work for inclusion in the main Conference proceedings. Based on the reviewers’ scores, we selected the paper Adapting Sentiment Lexicons using Contextual Semantics for Twitter Sentiment Analysis, by Hassan Saif, Yulan He, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani. We are grateful to the Programme Committee for their hard work, and to the authors for submitting their papers and for addressing the reviewers’ comments. We would also like to thank the organisers of the 11th European Semantic Web Conference for hosting SSA2014 at ESWC2014 and for giving us the opportunity to organise this workshop in such an interesting and stimulating scientific environment. Further information about the Workshop on Semantic Sentiment Analysis can be found at: http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/SemanticSentimentAnalysis2014