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NLP Tools Contests for Participants

Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages

Machine translation (MT) is the process of encoding the syntactic and semantic information of a source language text into a target language. In 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 tool contest in ICON 2015 aims to collectively explore the effectiveness of SMT while translating within ILs and between English and ILs.

CONTEST:
In the contest, training data will be provided to the contestants. It will consist of parallel corpus for different ILs and English. The contestants will have to train their systems on the data.
A development corpus will also be provided to refine and improve their system. The final contest will be held on November, 2015 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 detail of the language pair will be announced shortly. We will test translation in both directions for all language pairs.
The detail of the evaluation procedure and the uses policy of additional resources/tools will be announced shortly.

The contest will have three prizes:
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-




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, they use phonetic typing/ roman script/ transliteration, frequently insert English elements through code-mixing and anglicisms (see the following example [1]), and often mix multiple languages to express their thoughts.

Thus it is clear that even though 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, poses additional difficulties for automatic Indian social media text processing. Part-of-speech (POS) is an essential prerequisite for any kind of NLP applications.

This year we will have POS tagging shared-task on three widely spoken Indian languages (Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu), mixed with English.

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 word-level languages. 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 2015.

The contest will have three prizes:
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-


Student Paper Competition In Language Technologies

ICON-2015 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 icon2015@iiit.ac.in.