Preface


The First International Workshop on Exploitation of Social Media
for Emergency Relief and Preparedness (SMERP) (website:
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~dganguly/smerp2017/)           was
organized at Aberdeen, Scotland, UK on April 9, 2017 in
conjunction with the 39th European Conference on Information
Retrieval (ECIR).

We organized two tracks in the workshop this year:

  1. Peer-review track: In this track, we invited original
     research papers related to the theme of the workshop.
  2. Data challenge track: In this track, we organized a TREC-
     style evaluation platform by sharing a dataset and inviting
     researchers to submit their results on the same. This track
     comprised two tasks, namely, Text Retrieval and Text
     Summarization, each consisting of two levels of evaluation.

Five (5) papers were accepted for the Peer-review track. Six (6)
teams participated in the Data challenge track with a total of 24
runs submitted in the Text Retrieval task and 11 summaries
submitted in the Text Summarization task. The authors of the
accepted papers of the Peer-review track and the best performing
teams in the Data challenge track were invited to present their
work at the workshop. The workshop also hosted two keynote
talks (by Muhammad Imran and Richard McCreadie) and fruitful
discussion sessions.

We are grateful to the ECIR 2017 committee for allowing us to
organize this workshop. We also express our heartfelt gratitude to
the participants, keynote speakers, Program Committee members
and human annotators for their support.
We look forward to continuing this effort in near future. It will be
heartening for us if the shared dataset and research findings
reported in SMERP 2017 contribute to the dissemination of
knowledge in the social media community worldwide.

                                                  Saptarshi Ghosh
                                               Kripabandhu Ghosh
                                              Tanmoy Chakraborty
                                                  Debasis Ganguly
                                                      Gareth Jones
                                             Marie-Francine Moens