Submissions are invited for a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (IEEE TAC) on Affective Reasoning for Big Social Data Analysis. For more information, please visit: http://sentic.net/affreason

RATIONALE
As the Web rapidly evolves, Web users are evolving with it. In an era of social connectedness, people are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about interacting, sharing, and collaborating through social networks, online communities, blogs, Wikis, and other online collaborative media. In recent years, this collective intelligence has spread to many different areas, with particular focus on fields related to everyday life such as commerce, tourism, education, and health, causing the size of the Web to expand exponentially.

The distillation of knowledge from such a big amount of unstructured information, however, is an extremely difficult task, as the contents of today's Web are perfectly suitable for human consumption, but remain hardly accessible to machines. The opportunity to capture the opinions of the general public about social events, political movements, company strategies, marketing campaigns, and product preferences has raised growing interest both within the scientific community, leading to many exciting open challenges, as well as in the business world, due to the remarkable benefits to be had from marketing and financial market prediction.

Existing approaches to big social data analysis mainly rely on parts of text in which sentiment is explicitly expressed, e.g., through polarity terms or affect words (and their co-occurrence frequencies). However, opinions and sentiments are often conveyed implicitly through latent semantics, which make purely syntactical approaches ineffective. In this light, this Special Issue focuses on the introduction, presentation, and discussion of novel techniques that further develop and apply affective reasoning tools and techniques for big social data analysis. A key motivation for this Special Issue, in particular, is to explore the adoption of novel affective reasoning frameworks and cognitive learning systems to go beyond a mere word-level analysis of natural language text and provide novel concept-level tools and techniques that allow a more efficient passage from (unstructured) natural language to (structured) machine-processable affective data, in potentially any domain.

TOPICS
Articles are thus invited in areas such as machine learning, weakly supervised learning, active learning, transfer learning, deep neural networks, novel neural and cognitive models, data mining, pattern recognition, knowledge-based systems, information retrieval, natural language processing, common-sense reasoning, and big data computing. Topics include, but are not limited to:
• Machine learning for big social data analysis • Affective common-sense reasoning • Social network modeling and analysis • Social media representation and retrieval • Discovering conceptual primitives for sentiment analysis • Affective human-agent, -computer, and-robot interaction • Multi-modal sentiment analysis • User profiling and personalization • Aided affective knowledge acquisition • Multi-lingual sentiment analysis • Time-evolving sentiment tracking The Special Issue also welcomes papers on specific application domains of big social data analysis, e.g., influence networks, customer experience management, intelligent user interfaces, multimedia management, computer-mediated human-human communication, enterprise feedback management, surveillance, art.
The authors will be required to follow the Author's Guide for manuscript submission to IEEE TAC.

TIMEFRAME
January 21st, 2017: Paper submission deadline (strict) April 1st, 2017: Notification of acceptance May 1st, 2017: Revised submission deadline June 1st, 2017: Final manuscript due

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
The IEEE TAC special issue on Affective and Cognitive Learning Systems for Big Social Data Analysis will consist of papers on novel methods and techniques that further develop and apply big data analysis tools and techniques in the context of opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Some papers may survey various aspects of the topic. The balance between these will be adjusted to maximize the issue's impact. All articles are expected to successfully negotiate the standard review procedures for IEEE TAC.

ORGANIZERS
• Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) • Amir Hussain, University of Stirling (UK) • Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow (UK)