[apsa_itp] Call for Papers - Special Issue of JITP on "Text Annotation for Political Science Research"

["Dr. Stuart W. Shulman" <editor@xxxxxxxx>]

(please circulate this widely and target likely authors)

 

Call for Papers
A special issue of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics
http://www.jitp.net

 

“Text Annotation for Political Science Research”

http://www.jitp.net/files/cfp_text_issue.pdf

 

Text is an important data source for political science research. Large, digitized text collections
are becoming increasingly common. Yet most political scientists have little familiarity with the
language‐processing methodologies available to support research using these collections.
Specifically, we are interested in methodologies from the fields of information retrieval, natural
language processing, and machine learning. These techniques facilitate the automatic
searching, organizing, categorizing, and extracting of information from digitized text.

 

At a high level, the goal of language‐processing is to provide one or more semantic annotations
on the text. The political science question of interest can then be explored using these
annotations. Text annotation techniques vary not only according to the type of semantic
annotation required, but also according to the degree of manual intervention involved in the
annotation process: text annotation tasks can be accomplished entirely manually (i.e., via
human content coding), entirely automatically (e.g. via keyword‐based search or text clustering
algorithms), automatically after a manual training period (i.e. via "supervised" machine learning
methods), or semi‐automatically (e.g. via "weakly supervised" machine learning methods that
acquire automatic annotation systems from very small amounts of manually labeled text).

 

Although the potential of text annotation methods for political science research is enormous, it
is understandably difficult for researchers to know where to start. In addition, in contrast to
other research methodologies in the social sciences, the criteria for evaluating social science
results that rely on automatic text annotation systems are not widely known, accepted, or
appreciated. Keyword searches, for example, are commonly used to trace changing political
attention across time, but rarely is attention given to their reliability or accuracy, raising doubts
about the validity of researcher inferences.

 

The aim of the special issue is to solicit and publish papers that provide a clear view of the state
of the art in text annotation and evaluation, especially for political science. How do the
techniques map onto major questions addressed by political scientists? What kinds of
problems have been addressed in existing work and what text annotation methods have proven
most successful? Are standard statistical measures of accuracy, recall, and precision adequate
for evaluating the performance of the text annotation technique, or are new evaluation
procedures needed that simultaneously consider the social science question being
investigated?

 

Given these interests, we therefore encourage submissions in the following areas:

• tutorial-style surveys of state-of-the-art techniques in human language technologies and
text annotation;
• surveys of the state-of-the-art in the application of language-processing techniques in
the social sciences, particularly in political science;
• comparisons of competing text annotation methodologies on the same corpus/corpora;
• innovative evaluation and diagnostic methods;
• studies of text annotation methods that try to limit the amount of costly, manually
annotated data for training automatic annotators, e.g. active learning;
• specific applications and evaluations of language-processing and text annotation
techniques;
• applications of the text-processing techniques on non-social science problems that point
the way to innovative social science applications; and
• surveys of the available language-processing tools and resources with guidance for
when to use them.

 

All submissions must be prepared according to the submission guidelines available at:
http://www.jitp.net.

 

Authors must submit via:
http://www.criticalmath.com/method/sm.php?org_id=12789

 

The initial submission is due by November 1, 2007

 

The guest editors for the special are:

 

Claire Cardie, Professor
Computer Science and Information Science
4130 Upson Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853‐7501
cardie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

John Wilkerson, Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
101 Gowen Hall
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195‐353530
jwilker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

________________________________________________________
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Director, Sara Fine Institute
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~fineinst/
School of Information Sciences
Director, Qualitative Data Analysis Program
University Center for Social and Urban Research
http://www.qdap.pitt.edu/
University of Pittsburgh
121 University Place, Suite 600
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412.624.3776 (v) 412.624.4810 (f)
http://shulman.ucsur.pitt.edu
Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics
http://www.jitp.net
________________________________________________________

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