The 17th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics (17th CCL) and
The 6th International Symposium on Natural Language Processing based on Naturally Annotated Big Data (6th NLP-NABD)
Joint Call for Papers

The 17th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL) will take place in Changsha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changsha), China, 19-21 October 2018, hosted by Changsha University of Science and Technology (http://www.csust.edu.cn/). CCL is an annual conference starting from 1991 (bi-annual before 2013). It is the flagship conference of the Chinese Information Processing Society (CIPS), the largest NLP scholar and expert community in China. After more than 20 years’ development, CCL has been widely recognized as the most authoritative, influential and largest NLP conference in China. Over 700 registered researchers and practitioners attended CCL 2017. With a major emphasis on computer processing of the languages in China, CCL is a premier nation-wide forum for disseminating new scholarly and technological work in computational linguistics.

You are invited to submit original research and application papers on all the topics of computational linguistics related to the Chinese language and minority languages in China, including but not limited to the following:

• Cognitive modelling of language processing and psycholinguistics
• Discourse, coreference and pragmatics
• Evaluation methods
• Language resources and annotation
• Lexical semantics and ontologies
• Large-scale knowledge acquisition and reasoning
• Machine translation
• Multilinguality in NLP
• NLP applications
• NLP for social media
• Named entity recognition and linking
• Open-domain question answering
• Semantics
• Sentiment analysis, opinion mining and text classification
• Social computing
• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Statistical and machine learning methods in NLP
• Summarization and generation
• Syntactic analysis and parsing the Web
• Tagging and chunking
• Textual entailment
• Text mining, open-domain information extraction and machine reading of the Web
• Web information retrieval
• Underresourced languages processing
• Word segmentation
• Word sense disambiguation
• Multimodal processing
• Medical NLP

Papers submitted to CCL can be in Chinese or English. Whether an accepted paper will be presented as an oral presentation or as a poster presentation is determined by the Program Committee. Accepted in Chinese will be published by the Journal of Chinese Information Processing, Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), Science China, and other key Computer Science journals of China technology. The directory of key journals of China technology is officially released by Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China annually. The authors of accepted papers must revise the papers according to the review before being published. The Journal of Chinese Information Processing reserves the right not to publish an accepted CCL paper that has not been revised according to the review. Science China and other journals to which papers are recommended might require an additional review before being accepted for publication. Accepted papers in English will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series.

Attached to the 17th CCL, we start up the Sixth International Symposium on Natural Language Processing based on Naturally Annotated Big Data (6th NLP-NABD). NLP-NABD covers all the NLP topics, as listed above, with particular interest in the cutting-edge methodologies and technologies of natural language processing in the era of big data. The so-called “naturally annotated” means different type of annotations on varieties of Web resources which are “unconsciously handcrafted” by Web users for their own purposes (in general, nothing to do with natural language processing), but can be used by computational linguists in a conscious and systematic way for various tasks of natural language processing, for examples, punctuation marks in Chinese can benefit word boundaries identification, social tags in social media can benefit keyword extraction, “categories” given in Wikipedia can benefit text categorization. The natural annotation can be explicit, as in above examples, or can be implicit, as “NOUN and other NPs” in “Beijing and other cities” as well as “NPs such as NOUN” in “cities such as Beijing”. This symposium aims at numerous research challenges ranging from very-large-scale unsupervised/semi-supervised machine leaning (deep learning for instance) of naturally annotated big data to integration of the learned resources and models with existing handcrafted “core” resources and “core” language computing models. NLP-NABD 2018 is supported by National Key Basic Research Program of China (i.e., “973” Program) “Theory and Methods for Cyber-Physical-Human Space Oriented Web Chinese Information Processing” under the grant NO.2014CB340500.

NLP-NABD targets at computation of any languages in the world. Only papers in English are accepted and will also be included in LNAI, together with the accepted English papers of 17th CCL.

Papers in Chinese submitted to 17th CCL should not exceed 10 pages following Journal of Chinese Information Processing’s manuscript submission guideline: http://www.cipsc.org.cn/jsip/tougao.php. Papers in English submitted to 17th CCL and 6th NLP-NABD should not exceed 12 pages following Springer's manuscript submission guideline: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. LNAI will submit the published papers to EI Compendex for indexing automatically, and the chance of being indexed is high according to previous experience of Springer. All English papers accepted by CCL & NLP-NABD 2013-2017 have been indexed by EI Compendex. More information about the indexing of LNAI, please refer to the link:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-1068921-0.

CCL and NLP-NABD have granted best paper awards to high-quality and influential submissions in Chinese and English respectively since 2014. This year, the Program Committee will grant two awards as before. The CCL 2018 Best Paper Award is presented to the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to Chinese information processing. The NLP-NABD 2018 Best Paper Award is presented to the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit related to natural language processing in the era of big data. The recipients of each award will receive RMB 3,000 (~USD 500) and a certificate.

Important dates
• Paper submission deadline: 1 June 2018
• Notification of acceptance: 1 July 2018
• Camera ready submission: 15 July 2018

Submission Information: Papers will be double-blindly reviewed without the authors' names and affiliations included. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Submission will be electronic in PDF format through the START system at: https://www.softconf.com/i/ccl2018.

Multiple-Submission Policy: CCL & NLP-NABD 2018 allows authors to submit manuscripts to leading NLP international conferences (e.g., COLING 2018 and EMNLP 2018) at the same time only if the conferences have established similar multiple-submission policies. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other conferences must indicate this at the submission time. Authors of papers accepted for presentation in CCL & NLP-NABD 2018 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline (i.e., 15 July 2018) as to whether the paper will be presented at CCL & NLP-NABD 2018. Once confirmed, the paper must be withdrawn from other venues. We will not accept papers that are identical or overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Conference Website
http://www.cips-cl.org/CCL2018/index.html