*ICON-2016: THIRTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING*
Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University)
Varanasi, India
December 16-19, 2016
Organized by
NLP Association, India
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi
Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages, CIIL, Mysore
SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
The Thirteenth International Conference on Natural Language Processing
(ICON-2016) will be held at IIT (BHU), Varanasi during December 16-19,
2016. The ICON Conference series is a forum for promoting interaction among
researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Computational Linguistics (CL) in India and abroad. The main conference is
on December 17-18, 2016. This will be preceded by one day of pre-conference
tutorials/workshops on December 16, 2016 and post conference
tutorials/workshops on December 19, 2016.
Papers in ICON proceedings will be indexed in ACL Anthology. ACL Anthology
is a digital archive of research papers in Computational Linguistics for
major international conferences under Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL), one of the most well known association for NLP and CL.
1. TOPICS:
Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all
aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on South
Asian languages and other less resourced languages, issues, and
applications relevant to South Asia. The areas of interest include, but are
not limited to:
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Discourse
POS Tagging
Parsing
Word Sense Disambiguation
Machine Translation/Statistical Machine Translation
Pragmatics
Computational or Quantitative Psycholinguistics
Statistical Methods
Knowledge-based Methods
Annotation and Annotated Corpora
Lexical Resources
Ontology
Sentiment Analysis
Machine Learning in NLP
NLP-based Recommendation Systems
Performance Evaluation of NLP Systems
Information Retrieval
Information Extraction
Automatic Text Summarization
Question Answering
Dialog Systems
Speech Corpora
Speech Recognition
Speech Synthesis
NLP for Language Documentation and Preservation
NLP for Educational Purposes
NLP for Digital Humanities
The authors have to submit papers under any of the areas mentioned above
and must mark the topic of their paper at the time of submission.
2. FORMAT OF SUBMISSION:
Papers in English, not exceeding 10 pages, should be submitted on the
ONLINE PORTAL at ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon2016. Papers should include an
abstract of about 100-200 words. Please see the style file at
www.aclweb.org/downloads/acl-ftp/Styfiles/Proceedings/
DOUBLE BLIND REVIEW:
Papers in electronic form in the PDF format, anonymous for double blind
review, should be submitted. If your paper contains text of languages other
than English, please attach relevant font files along with your submission.
3. CALL FOR TUTORIALS/WORKSHOPS:
Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials/workshops.
Tutorials/Workshops can be of half-day or full-day duration. The proposal
should be presented in the form of a 200-word abstract, one page topical
outline of the content, description of the proposers and their
qualifications relating to the tutorial content.
Workshops on linguistic aspects of South Asian languages are also welcome.
Send tutorial/workshop proposals to the ICON-2016 Secretariat. For further
information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2016
Secretariat.
4. NLP TOOLS CONTESTS:
4.1 WORD ALIGNMENT FROM ENGLISH/IL TO IL USING PARALLEL CORPORA
Machine translation (MT) is the process of encoding the syntactic and
semantic information of a source language text into a target language. In
the past two decades, MT has shown very promising results particularly
using Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) especially for English and
other European Languages.
However, its effectiveness in translating sentences within Indian Languages
(IL) and between English and Indian languages needs to be explored further.
The NLP tools contest in ICON 2016 aims to collectively explore the
effectiveness of word alignment techniques for ILs. Better word aligned
data can be useful not only for computational (such as SMT) purposes but
also for obtaining linguistic insights.
CONTEST:
In the contest, training data will be provided to the contestants. It will
consist of word aligned parallel corpus for different ILs and English. The
contestants will have to train their systems on the data and build systems
that can perform word alignment given sentence aligned parallel corpus.
They will be free to use statistical, rule-based or hybrid methods. A
development corpus will also be provided to refine and improve their
system. The final contest will be held in November, 2016 with the test
data. A workshop will be held as a part of ICON to allow the short listed
candidates to present their techniques and results.
The details about the language pairs will be announced shortly. We are
likely to test word alignment in both directions for all given language
pairs.
The details of the evaluation procedure and the use policy of additional
resources/tools will also be announced shortly.
The contest will have three prizes:
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-
4.2 POS TAGGING FOR CODE-MIXED INDIAN SOCIAL MEDIA TEXT RATIONALE
The evolution of social media texts such as blogs, micro-blogs (e.g.,
Twitter), and chats (e.g., Facebook messages) has created many new
opportunities for information access and language technology, but also many
new challenges, making it one of the prime present-day research areas.
Non-English speakers, especially Indians, do not always use Unicode to
write something in social media in ILs. Instead, they use phonetic typing/
roman script/ transliteration and frequently insert English words or
phrases through code-mixing and anglicisms (see the following example [1]),
and often mix multiple languages to express their thoughts.
While it is clear that English still is the principal language for social
media communications, there is a growing need to develop technologies for
other languages, including Indian languages. India is home to several
hundred languages. Language diversity and dialect changes instigate
frequent code-mixing in India. Hence, Indians are multi-lingual by
adaptation and necessity, and frequently change and mix languages in social
media contexts, which poses additional difficulties for automatic Indian
social media text processing. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is an essential
prerequisite for any kind of NLP applications.
This year we will continue the last year.s POS tagging shared-task on three
widely spoken Indian languages (Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu), mixed with
English.
Example 1: ICON 2016 Varanasi me hold hoga! Great chance to see the
pracheen nagari!
THE CONTEST
Participants will be provided training, development and test data to report
the efficiency of their POS tagging system. English-Hindi, English-Bengali,
and English-Telugu language mixing will be explored. The datasets may be
provided with some additional information like the languages of each word.
Efficiency will be measured in terms of Precision, Recall, and F-measure.
Shortlisted candidates will present their techniques and results in a
special session at ICON 2016.
The contest will have three prizes:
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-
Please check this page for more details:
http://amitavadas.com/Code-Mixing.html
5. STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES
ICON-2016 announces STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION in two tracks:
Track I : NLP (All areas)
Track II : Linguistics (Morphology, Syntax and Semantics)
Papers may be submitted under the link on the web page. Prizes will be
awarded in each track for up to two papers based on original work carried
out. The prizes are::
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-
The short-listed papers in each track will be invited for presentation in a
special session in the conference. Registration, domestic travel and
subsistence expenses will be provided by the conference organizers for one
author of each paper. Up to two winners will be offered summer fellowships
at major NLP Centres in India. For any clarifications, contact Student
Paper Competition Chair on [email protected].
6. IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper Submission Deadline Aug 19, 2016
Paper Acceptance Notification Oct 21, 2016
Camera Ready Copy Submission Nov 15, 2016
Tutorial/Workshop Proposals Aug 20, 2016
Tutorial/Workshop Acceptance
Notification Sep 10, 2016
NLP Tools Contest Registration Deadline Aug 7, 2016
Student Paper Competition Submission Deadline Aug 17, 2016
7. COMMITTEES:
Advisory Committee Chair
Aravind K Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA (Chair)
Richard Sproat, Google, Inc., New York, USA
Conference General Chair
Rajeev Sangal, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India
Programme Committee
Anil Kumar Singh, IIT (BHU), India (Chair)
Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT Hyderabad, India (Co-Chair)
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Srinivas Bangalore, Interactions LLC, AT&T Research, USA
Peri Bhaskararao, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Rajesh Bhatt, University of Massachusetts, USA
Pushpak Bhattacharyya, IIT Patna, India
Vishal Goyal, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
Sanukata Ghosh, BHU, Varanasi, India
Harald Hammarstr, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen,
The Netherlands
Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Universitde Caen, Normandie, France
Gerold Hintz, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Samar Husain, IIT Delhi, India
Gurpreet Lehal, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
Roser Morante, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jose Moreno, Universitde Caen, Normandie, France
Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University, Sweden
Alexis Palmer, Heidelberg University, Germany
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Soma Paul, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Jyoti Pawar, DCST, Goa University, India
Eugen Ruppert, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Sriparna Saha, IIT Patna, India
Shikhar Kr. Sarma, Gauhati University, India
Elizabeth Sherly, IIITM-K, Trivandrum, India
Sobha Lalitha Devi, AU-KBC, Chennai, India
Keh-Yih Su, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Anil Thakur, BHU, Varanasi, India
Vasudeva Varma, IIIT Hyderabad, India
Tools Contest Chairs
Word Alignment from English/IL TO IL Using Parallel Corpora
Sriram Venkatapathy, Amazon, Bengaluru, India (Chair)
Manish Shrivastava, IIIT Hyderabad, India (Co-Chair)
POS Tagging for Code-Mixed Indian Social Media Text Rationale
(More details at http://amitavadas.com/Code-Mixing.html)
Amitav Das, IIIT, Sri City, India
Student Paper Competition Chair
Asif Ekbal, IIT-Patna, India
Organizing Committee
Sukomal Pal, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India (Chair)
Swasti Mishra, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India
8. CONTACT INFORMATION
ICON-2016 Secretariat
Language Technologies Research Centre
International Institute of Information Technology
Gachibowli, Hyderabad - 500 032, India
Ph: +91-40-6653 1333, 6653 1144 Fax: +91-400-6653 1413
e-mail: [email protected]
URL: www.iiit.ac.in/icon2016
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