User-Generated Content in Social Media (Dagstuhl Seminar 17301)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 17301 "User-Generated Content in Social Media". Social media have a profound impact on individuals, businesses, and society. As users post vast amounts of text and multimedia content  every minute, the analysis of this user generated content (UGC) can offer insights to individual and societal concerns and could be beneficial to a wide range of applications. In this seminar, we brought together researchers from different subfields of computer science, such as information retrieval, multimedia, natural language processing, machine learning and social media analytics. We discussed the specific properties of UGC, the general research tasks currently operating on this type of content, identifying their limitations, and imagining new types of applications. We formed two working groups,  WG1 "Fake News and Credibility", WG2 "Summarizing and Story Telling from UGC". WG1 invented an "Information Nutrition Label" that characterizes a document by different features such as e.g. emotion, opinion, controversy, and topicality; For computing these feature values, available methods and open research issues were identified. WG2 developed a framework for summarizing heterogeneous, multilingual and multimodal data, discussed key challenges and applications of this framework.