Overview of RepLab 2012: Evaluating Online Reputation Management Systems

This paper summarizes the goals, organization and results of the first RepLab competitive evaluation campaign for Online Reputation Management Systems (RepLab 2012). RepLab focused on the reputation of companies, and asked participant systems to annotate different types of information on tweets containing the names of several companies. Two tasks were proposed: a profiling task, where tweets had to be annotated for relevance and polarity for reputation, and a monitoring task, where tweets had to be clustered thematically and clusters had to be ordered by priority (for reputation management purposes). The gold standard consisted of annotations made by reputation management experts, a feature which turns the RepLab 2012 test collection in a useful source not only to evaluate systems, but also to reach a better understanding of the notions of polarity and priority in the context of reputation management.