The Sixth International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON 2008) will be held at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India during 20-22 December, 2008. The ICON 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

There will be four keynote lectures in the conference besides the technical program of contributed papers.

1. Tony Veale, University College Dublin, Dublin
2. Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T, USA
3. K V Ramakrishnamacharyulu, Professor of Sanskrit, Tirupati
   (Awaiting confirmation from one more speaker)

After rigorous international refereeing process, the following papers have been selected for presentation at the conference.

• Towards Developing an English-Persian Word-level Parallel Concordancer
  • Tayebeh Mosavi Miangah, Mahshid Shakiba

• Morpheme Components based Tamil Part of Speech Tagging
  • Lakshmana Pandian S, Geetha T.V

• Semi-Automatic Generation of Pronunciation Dictionary for Proper Names: An Optimization Approach
  • Laxmi Narayana, Sunil Kumar Kopparapu

• Design and Evaluation of soft keyboards for Telugu
  • Sowmya V.B., Vasudeva Varma

• A generative lexicon account of A-V complex predicates of Bangla
  • Sanjukta Ghosh

• Sequence labeling approach for English to Tamil Transliteration using Memory-based Learning
  • Vijaya MS, Shivapratap G, Dhanalakshmi V, Ajith VP, Soman KP

• A Corpus-based Study of (kare) in Bangla: Theoretical and Computational Perspectives
  • Priyanka Biswas, Sandipan Dandapat, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury

  
  
• Effect of Modifiers for Sentiment Classification of Reviews
  • Meenakshi Sundaram Murugeshan, Saswati Mukherjee

• A Dependency Treelet Based Phrasal SMT: Evaluation and Issues in English-Hindi Language Pair
  • Kalika Bali, Baskaran Sankaran, Kumaran A

• Dictionary containing Example based Nepali WSD
  • Niraj Shrestha, Patrick V. Hall, Sanat Kumar Bista

• NL query interpretation in restricted domains
  • Leonardo Lesmo

• Automatic Evaluation of Wordnet Synonyms and Hypernyms
  • Raghuvar Nadig, J. Ramanand, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

• Domain Specific Iterative Word Sense Disambiguation in a Multilingual Setting
  • Mitesh Khapra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Shashank Chauhan, Soumya Nair, Aditya Sharma

• Two semantic features make all the difference in Parsing accuracy
  • Akshar Bharati, Samar Husain, Bharat Ambati, Sambhav Jain, Dipti Misra Sharma, Rajeev Sangal

• Hindi POS Tagger Using Naive Stemming: Harnessing Morphological Information Without Extensive Linguistic Knowledge
  • Manish Shrivastava, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

• Throat Microphone Signals for Syllable Recognition using Linear Prediction Cepstrum
  • A Shahina, Bayya Yegnanarayana, A Nayeemulla, M R

• A Rule Based Approach for Automatic Annotation of a Hindi Tree Bank
  • Mridul Gupta, Vineet Yadav, Samar Husain, Dipti M Sharma

• Estimating Relevance and Semantic Compatibility for IE Pattern Discovery in Large Text Corpora
  • Siddharth Patwardhan, Amit Goyal, Ellen Riloff, Hal Daume

• A System for Compound Noun Multiword Expression Extraction for Hindi
  • Anoop Kunchukuttan, Om Damani

• Building Myanmar-English Machine-Readable Dictionary by Implementing Ontology
  • Ei Mon Khine, Sint Sint Aung

• Use of Amarakosha and Hindi WordNet in Building a Network of Sanskrit Words
  • Akshar Bharati, Amba Kulkarni, Sivaja S Nair

• A Novel Semi-supervised Method for Named Entity Detection
  • Sujan Kumar Saha, Sudeshna Sarkar, Pabitra Mitra

• Appropriate Unlabeled Data, Post-processing and Voting can Improve the Performance of a NER System
  • Asif Ekbal, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

• The Copularizing Lexemes (COPL): Evidence from Manipuri
  • Nandaraj Meetei

• Result Merging of Information Retrieval System Rankings under Linguistic Preferences under Fuzzy Linguistic Quantifiers
  • Arijit De

• Problems of Transfer Grammar: The Hindi Postpositional Correlatives in Bangla
  • Sibansu Mukhopadhyay, Biswanath Barik, Sudeshna Sarkar

• Studies on Natural Variability in Human Speech and Perception for Enhancing the Quality of Synthetic Speech
  • Ramakrishnan AG, Laxmi Narayana

• Manipuri POS Tagging using CRF and SVM: A Language Independent
  • Thoudam Doren Singh, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

• Web-Based Ontological Resource for 'Purpose of Artifact'
  • Kiran Mayee, Rajeev Sangal, Soma Paul, Navjyoti Singh

• Detecting flames and insults in text
  • Altaf Mahmud, Kazi Zubair Ahmed, Mumit Khan

• Enhancing effectiveness of sentence alignment in parallel corpora: Using MT & heuristics
  • Sriram Chaudhury, Kiran Pala, Lakshminarayana Kodavali, Keshav Singhal

• Comparative Analysis of phrasal cohesion of English-Hindi with English-French
  • Vineet Yadav, Sriram Venkatapathy, Karthik Gali

• A Comparative Study of Emotional and Non-Emotional Lexicons in the Wordnet: A Complex Network Approach
  • Plaban Kumar Bhowmick, Animesh Mukherjee, Aritra Banik, Pabitra Mitra, Anupam Basu

• Semantic Graph from English Sentences
  • Rajat Mohanty, Sandeep Limaye, M. Krishna, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

There will be three tutorials on 20 December 2008.

Tutorial 1 : Eilenberg machines, the Zen toolkit, and applications to Sanskrit Computational Linguistics.

Speakers : Gerard Huet, Directeur de recherches, INRIA. Benoit Razet, Doctoral student, Paris 7 University.

Tutorial 2 : Linguistic Data Annotation for Indian Languages

Speakers : Dipti Misra Sharma, et al, IIIT Hyderabad

Tutorial 3 : Sense Disambiguation and Attachment Disambiguation

Speakers : Pushpak Bhattacharyya and Mitesh Khapra, IIT Bombay

Selected papers based on original work will be presented for the final round of evaluation in the following two tracks:
     Track I : Natural Language Processing (All areas)
     Track II : Linguistics (Morphology, Syntax and Semantics).

Prizes will be awarded in each track for a total of two papers.

Registration Details:

*Please note that student rates are only applicable to participants who will have full-time student status as on 01 August 2008. A letter verifying this status must accompany all registration forms. Letters must be signed by either a supervisor or head of department. If you register via the website a letter verifying student status must be sent by hard copy to the ICON-2008 Secretariat and must be carried in person and presented at the time of collecting the registration kit.

A limited number of students can be supported for travel within India under a grant from CIIL, Mysore. Kindly send your applications by November 24, 2008 to icon2008@iiit.ac.in.
For any clarification, please contact icon2008@iiit.ac.in

Conference Venue:

C-DAC, Pune

Contact Address: