Preface

Research on microtext is becoming increasingly necessary given the explosion of on-line microtext lan- guage. Yet very few suitable tools have been developed for analyzing it. Also, there are few sufficiently large publicly-available data sets (such as the Twitter corpus). Currently, most NLP tools are designed to deal with grammatical, properly spelled and punctuated language corpora. However, the reality is that a vast portion of online data does not conform to the canons of standard grammar and spelling. This symposium provides a multi-day forum to bring together researchers from different communities who have an interest in analyzing microtext: artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval, linguistics, human-computer interaction, education, and the social sciences. It provides enough time for the different communities to present their perspectives and methodologies, to learn one another's terminology and techniques, and to begin to form connections that will hopefully lead to fruitful collaborations.