ICON-2017: FOURTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

The fourteenth International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2017) will be held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata during December 18-21, 2017. 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 19-20, 2017. This will be preceded by one day of pre-conference tutorials on December 18, 2017 and one day of post conference workshops on December 21, 2017.

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), which is one of the most well-known associations for NLP and CL. The previous proceedings of ICON 2014, ICON 2015 and ICON 2016 can be found in ACL Anthology.


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Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on South Asian languages and other less resourced languages, issues, and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. Papers on other languages of the world are also invited. 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
*Natural Language Generation
*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(s) 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/icon2017. Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200 words. Please see the style file at www.aclweb.org/downloads/acl-ftp/Styfiles/Proceedings/

There are two tracks: one for the main conference and one for the Student Paper Competition. You should select one of these while submitting the paper (not both). For the NLP Tools Contest, paper submission will be through the special website made for this contest (see below).

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 fontfiles along with your submission.

3. CALL FOR TUTORIALS/WORKSHOPS:

Proposals are invited for pre-conferencetutorials/workshops. Tutorials/Workshops can be of half-day or full-dayduration. 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-2017 Secretariat by email iconnlp@iiit.ac.in . For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2017 Secretariat.

4. NLP TOOLS CONTESTS:

4.1 Sentiment Analysis for Indian Languages

India is a linguistic area with one of the longest histories of contact, influence, use, teaching and learning of English-in-diaspora in the world (Kachru and Nelson, 2006). Thus, a huge number of Indians active on the internet are able in English communication to some degree. India also enjoys huge diversity in language. Apart from Hindi, it has several regional languages that are the primary tongue of people native to the region. This is to the extent that social media including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter etc. contain more than one language, and such phenomena is called code-mixing and code-switching. On the other side, the evolution of sentiments from such social media texts have also 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.Sentiment analysis in code-mixed data has several real-life applications in opinion mining from social media campaign to feedback analysis.

Linguistic processing of such social media dataset and its sentiment analysis is a difficult task. Till date, most of the experiments have been performed on identifying the languages (Bali et al., 2014; Das and Gamback, 2014), parts-of-speech tagging (Ghosh et al., 2016) etc. Few tasks also have been started on the sentiment analysis of code-mixed data such as Hindi-English (Joshi et al., 2016). Therefore, we believe that it is the best place to bring more research attention towards developing language technologies for identifying sentiments from Indian social media texts.

Main goal of this task is to identify the sentence level sentiment polarity of the code-mixed dataset of Indian languages pairs (Hi-En, Ben-Hi-En) collected from Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp.Each of the sentences is annotated with language information as well as polarity at sentence level. The participants will be provided development, training and test dataset.

Each participating team will be allowed to submit two systems for each of the language pairs and the best result will be considered as final. The final evaluation will be performed based on the macro-averaged F1-measure. The python code for the evaluation will provided by the organizers.Initially, each of participating teams will have access to the development and training data. Later, the unlabeled test data will be provided and the teams have to submit the results within 24 hours. There will be no distinction between constrained and unconstrained systems, but the participants will be asked to report what additional resources they have used for each of their submitted runs.


The contest will have three prizes:

FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-


5. STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

ICON-2017 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 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 iconnlp@iiit.ac.in. Submission of papers for the Student Paper Competition will be through the same EasyChair website as for the main conference. Just make sure to select the appropriate track.

6. IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper Submission Deadline Aug 27, 2017
Paper Acceptance Notification Oct 21, 2017
Camera Ready Copy Submission Nov 15, 2017
Tutorial/Workshop Proposals Submission Aug 27, 2017
Tutorial/Workshop Acceptance Notification Sep 10, 2017
NLP Tools Contest Registration Deadline Aug 7, 2017
Student Paper Competition Submission Deadline Aug 27, 2017

7. COMMITTEES:

Advisory Committee Chair
Aravind K Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA (Chair)

Conference General Chair
Rajeev Sangal, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India

Programme Committee
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Jadavpur University, India (Chair)
Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT Hyderabad, India (Co-Chair)

Tools Contest

Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, India (Chair)
Amitava Das, IIIT-Sri City, India

Student Paper Competition

Anil Kumar Singh, IIT(BHU), Varanasi, India

Organizing Committee

Sudip Naskar, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Dipankar Das, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

8. CONTACT INFORMATION

ICON-2017 Secretariat
Language Technologies Research Centre
International Institute of Information Technology
Gachibowli, Hyderabad - 500 032, India
Ph: +91-40-6653 1333 Fax: +91-400-6653 1413
e-mail: iconnlp@iiit.ac.in
URL: http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon2017/

Previous ICON Proceedings on ACL Anthology

http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/#5100
http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W15/#5900
http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/#6300