The fifth International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) will be held at IIIT, Hyderabad, India during 4 - 6 January, 2007. 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.

ICON-2007 will be held just before Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2007). IJCAI-2007 will be held in Hyderabad, India from 6 - 12 January, 2007. Participants who attend ICON-2007 Conference are likely to be given a special rate for attending IJCAI-2007. Please visit www.ijcai-07.org

Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on languages, issues, and applications relevant to India.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:

Papers in English, not exceeding 10 pages, should be submitted at www.iiit.ac.in/icon2007. One can also submit hard copy (four copies) under special circumstances. Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200 words. Papers outside the specified length are subject to rejection without review. Please see the style file at www.acl2006.mq.edu.au/program/style

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.

Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials. Tutorials can be of half-day or full-day duration. 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.

end tutorial proposals to the ICON-2007 Secretariat. For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2007 Secretariat.

Machine learning techniques are widely used today for a variety of tasks. In this contest, ML techniques will be applied to Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and chunking of Indian languages. These are usually essential tasks for any NLP application. This shared task aims to collectively explore various machine learning techniques (example, Hidden Markov Models) to solve the problem of POS tagging and chunking for Indian languages.

Competition:
In the competition, training data will be provided to the contestants. It will consist of annotated text. The contestants will have to train their systems on the data. Test data will be made available to them to improve and refine their system. The final contest will be held in January, 2007 with new test data. A workshop will be held to allow the shortlisted contestants to present their techniques and results.

The contestants may also tag data with the given tag set and submit to the contest. Those who do not submit may still participate. They will, however, be provided with reduced size of training data.

Resources:
*Tools which implement various machine learning techniques are available.
*Data submitted by all participants would be available to all the participants who submit data.

For any clarifications, please contact NLP Tools Contest Chair on icon07contest@iiit.ac.in

ICON-2007 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-2007 conference. Registration, domestic travel and subsistence expenses will be provided by the conference organizers for one author of each paper. Upto two winners will be offered summer fellowships at major NLP Centres in India. For any clarifications, contact Student Paper Competition Chair on icon07student@iiit.ac.in.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE CHAIR
Aravind K Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA

CONFERENCE GENERAL CHAIR
Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE CHAIR
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE Corporation, USA

TOOLS CONTEST CHAIR
Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION CHAIR
Achla M Raina, IIT, Kanpur,India

ORGANIZING CHAIR
R K Bagga, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

8. CONTACT INFORMATION