Preface

Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in research on data mining on social networks and social media. The ubiquitous nature of Web-enabled devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, enables users to participate and interact with each other in various Web communities. Examples of such communities include forums, newsgroups, blogs, microblogs, bookmarking services, photo sharing platforms, and location-based services. The rapidly evolving social Web provides a platform for communication, information sharing, and collaboration. A vast amount of heterogeneous data (composed of e.g., text, photos, video, links) has been generated by the users of various social communities, which offers excellent opportunity for studying novel theories and technologies for social Web search and mining.