ICON-2005: 4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING IIT Kanpur, India 18 - 20 December 2005 Organized by NLP Association, India Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS The 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) will be held in IIT, Kanpur, India during 18-20 December, 2005. The conference series is intended to act as a forum for promoting interaction among researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing in India and abroad. 1. TOPICS Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on languages, issues, and applications relevant to India. The areas of interest include, but are not limited to: Morphology POS tagging Phonology Parsing Syntax Word Sense Disambiguation Semantics Machine Translation Discourse Information Retrieval Pragmatics Text Summarization Statistical methods Question Answering Knowledge-based methods Dialog Systems Annotated Corpora Performance Evaluation Lexical Resources Speech corpora Propbank/Framenet Speech Recognition Ontology Text to Speech 2. FORMAT OF SUBMISSION Submissions in English, not exceeding 5000 words (including figures and references), should be submitted under the link on the web page. Under special circumstances, you may also send hard copy (four copies). Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200 words. Papers outside the specified length are subject to rejection without review. BLIND REVIEW: Kindly ensure that authors' names and affiliations are given only on a separate cover sheet. Papers in electronic form can be in plain text, Postscript, PDF, Latex or Microsoft Word (RTF only). If your paper contains text of languages other than English, please attach relevant font files along with your submission (http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon2005). 3. CALL FOR TUTORIALS Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials. Tutorials can be of half-day or full-day duration and will be held on December 18, 2005. 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. Send tutorial proposals to the ICON-2005 Secretariat. For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2005 Secretariat. 4. NLP TOOLS CONTEST: INFORMATION EXTRACTION An information extraction (IE) contest will be held during ICON-2005 for English and Hindi.The purpose of the contest is to encourage research groups as well as individuals to work on modular, portable, information extraction tools and systems. A domain will be announced in advance and a surprise sub-domain will be announced a month before the conference. The contest will test participating systems in the general domain category as well as the sub-domain category. Sample input-output data sets, information extraction templates (schema) will be released along with the announcement of domains. Test data will be released during the contest period. The detailed guidelines will be issued separately. To enter the contest, submit your name, organization name (if applicable), language of choice (English, Hindi or both) to the contest chair (icon05tools@iiit.ac.in). Visit (http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon2005/tools.html) for more details. 5. STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES ICON-2005 announces STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION in two tracks: Track I NLP (All areas) Track II Speech Synthesis Speech Recognition Handwriting Recognition 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.10000/- SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7500/- The short listed papers in each track will be invited for presentation in a special session in ICON-2005 conference. Registration, domestic travel and subsistence expenses will be provided by the conference organizers for one author of each paper. For any clarifications, contact Student Paper Competition Chair on icon05student@iiit.ac.in. 6. IMPORTANT DATES Paper registration deadline Jul 07, 2005 Paper submission deadline Jul 15, 2005 Paper acceptance notification Sep 05, 2005 Camera ready copy due Oct 15, 2005 Tutorial proposals due Jul 30, 2005 Tutorials acceptance notificatio Aug 15, 2005 Lecture Materials for tutorial Nov 25, 2005 NLP Tools Contest registration deadline Jul 20, 2005 Student Paper Competition submission deadline Aug 15, 2005 7. COMMITTEES ADVISORY COMMITTEE Aravind K Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA (Chair) Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA P V S Rao, Tata Infotech, Mumbai, India Mriganka Sur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Benjamin K Tsou, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Jun-ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan B Yegnanarayana, IIT, Madras, India CONFERENCE GENERAL CHAIR Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Amitabha Mukerjee, IIT, Kanpur, India (Chair) Timothy Baldwin, University of Melbourne, Australia Sushama M Bendre, University of Hyderabad, India Pushpak Bhattacharya, IIT, Bombay, India Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Key Sun Choi, KAIST, Korea Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, USA Adam Kilgariff, University of Brighton, UK Amba Kulkarni, IIIT, Hyderabad, India B Mallikarjun, CIIL, Mysore, India Inderjeet Mani, NW Georgetown University Washington, USA Hema A Murthy, IIT, Madras, India Achla M Raina, IIT, Kanpur, India Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, France K Samudravijaya, TIFR, Mumbai, India Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, Canada Vijay K Shanker, University of Delaware, USA Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India Udaya Narayana Singh, CIIL, Mysore, India R M K Sinha, IIT, Kanpur, India B Srinivas, AT&T Research, USA Keh-Yih Su, Behavior Design Corporation, Taiwan STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION CHAIR Sushama M Bendre, University of Hyderabad, India TOOLS CONTEST CHAIR Rohini K Srihari, SUNY, Buffalo, USA ORGANIZING CHAIRS Achla M Raina, IIT, Kanpur, India R K Bagga, IIIT, Hyderabad, India 8. CONTACT INFORMATION ICON-2005 Secretariat Language Technologies Research Centre International Institute of Information Technology Gachibowli, Hyderabad - 500 019, India Ph: +91-40-2300 0646; Fax: +91-40-2300 1413 e-mail: icon2005@iiit.ac.in URL: http://www.iiit.ac.in/icon2005.html