Computational Approaches to Blog Analysis

I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

• Robust NLP processing for blog analytics; blog document segmentation.
• Semantic analysis; cross-blog name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
• Sentiment analysis of blogs; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
• Text categorization; gender/age identification; blog spam filtering.
• Trend identification and tracking.
• Social Newtwork Analysis; social communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
• Centrality/Influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
• Semantic Web; semantic blogging; unstructured knowledge management.
• Multimedia; audio/visual blogs processing; aggregating information from different modalities; navigation.
• Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on blogs.
• AI methods for Ethnographic Analysis through blogs.
• Blogsphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media; news vs. blogs.
• Human Computer Interaction; next generation blogging tools; crawling/spidering; indexing of weblogs; user interfaces.