With the increasing volume and impact of communication on social media, social media analysis has become one of the most trending topics in natural language research, which can be observed in a growing number of workshops and conferences dedicated to this topic, projects funded, and research centers established. As a result, a number of social media resources containing chats, online commentaries, reviews, blogs, emails, forums, etc., as well as audio and video recordings, have been accumulated in the repositories of CLARIN centers. What is more, due to their distinct communicative characteristics, they pose new technical challenges for the standard natural language processing tools as well as new legal and ethical challenges for the dissemination of such resources, which has also been addressed by CLARIN, making the available infrastructure an important means for attracting new users to the CLARIN community.

The aims of the CLARIN-PLUS workshop "Creation and Use of Social Media Resources" are: to demonstrate the possibilities of social media resources and natural language processing tools for researchers with a diverse research background who are interested in empirical research of language and social practices in computer-mediated communication; to promote interdisciplinary cooperation possibilities; to initiate a discussion on the various approaches to social media data collection and processing.

This workshop took place in Kaunas, Lithuania from Thursday, 18 May, to Friday, 19 May, 2017 and is the fourth an last in a series of workshops funded in the conetxt of the CLARIN-PLUS project. We aim to attract about 30 specialists in discourse analysis, psychology, sociology, political science, media studies, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics from all CLARIN member countries. Researchers who are currently working outside of CLARIN projects and networks, but with a background relevant for the topic of the workshop are very welcome, since one of the main aims of these workshops is to reach new users and start new collaborations. However, places are limited, and mostly allocated via the national CLARIN consortiums, but please get in touch with [email protected] if you are interested in participating, or in adding information to the overview of relevant data sets and initiatives, or contributing otherwise.