Love & Hate in the Time of Social Media and Social Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Social networks are becoming more and more present in our daily life. According to the Global Web Index, digital consumers spend an average of 2 hours a day on social media and messaging. Thus, a large body of research has been developed in the last years to process automatically social media and social networks, with the aim of understanding, discovering insights and exploiting this information. All this has contributed to the development of research areas such as sentiment analysis and social network analysis. The new communication media offer a unique opportunity to observe "in the wild" feelings and reactions spontaneously expressed on different topics, often using figurative language: sarcastic messages can be the ones that spread more virulently.

Nowadays the focus of research is moving from polarity classification to more advanced and fine-grained aspects, which can reveal insights on users’ emotions or personality traits, or to their specific stance towards a target in online political debates, where also the presence of hate speech is an important issue to monitor, for preventing interference with other rights and the occasioning of certain harms. Temporal evolution of opinions in online communities is also a hot research topic, which calls for a combination of sentiment and social network analysis techniques.

The aim of this special issue is to put together contributions that analyze strong feelings, such as love or hate in social media and social networks.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Detection of opinions in debates on controversial topics
• Emotion diffusion in social networks and social media
• Emotion analysis techniques
• Affective ontologies
• Multimodal sentiment and emotion analysis
• Time evolving opinion and sentiment analysis
• Hate speech detection in social media
• Stance detection in social media
• Figurative language and sarcasm in online debates
• Applications of emotion aware techniques

Dr. Carlos A. Iglesias
Dr. Viviana Patti
Guest Editors

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