The seventh International Conference on Natural Language Processing(ICON 2009) will be held at University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India during 14-17 December, 2009. The ICON conference series is a forum for promoting interaction among researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing in India and abroad. This year ICON-2009 will be co-located with 31st All India Conference of Linguistics (AICL31)

ICON-2009 and AICL31 (the 31st All-India Conference of Linguists of the Linguistic Society of India) will be "held in parallel at the same venue" with the facility of registrants of one conference being allowed to freely attend the proceedings of the other.

apers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on languages, issues, and applications relevant to India.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

ICON-2009 will also have a separate track on Linguistic models in NLP. Purely theoretical papers in linguistics which have implications for computational linguistics are also invited under this track.

Papers in English, not exceeding 10 pages, should be submitted at www.iiit.ac.in/icon2009. 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 at  www.aclweb.org/downloads/acl-ftp/Styfiles/Proceedings/

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.

3. CALL FOR TUTORIALS

Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials. Tutorials/Workshops 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.

Send tutorial proposals to the ICON-2009 Secretariat. For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2009 Secretariat.

Efficient Indian language (IL) parsing still remains an open problem. One reason for this is the unavailability of annotated corpora to experiment. This contest aims to bring together researchers working/interested in the area of IL parsing to explore techniques that can improve the present accuracies, by providing sufficient annotated data. This contest, however, will only focus on dependency parsing.

Participants will be provided training, development and testing data to report the efficiency of their dependency parsers. Languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Oriya, Marathi, etc. will be explored. Parser efficiency will be measured in terms of standard measures such as Unlabelled attachment accuracy and Labelled attachment accuracy. Shortlisted candidates will present their techniques and results work in a special session at ICON. Note that it is not necessary that the participating parser be a statistical one, other types such as grammar driven parsers or hybrid parsers can also participate.

    FIRST PRIZE: Rs.7500/-
    SECOND PRIZE: Rs.5000/-

ICON-2009 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.7500/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.5000/-

The short-listed papers in each track will be invited for presentation in a special session in ICON-2009 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 icon09@students@iiit.ac.in.

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

CONFERENCE GENERAL CHAIR
Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE CHAIR
Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad
Vasudeva Varma, IIIT, Hyderabad

TOOLS CONTEST CHAIR
Samar Husain, IIIT, Hyderabad

STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION CHAIR
Sudeshna Sarkar, IIT, Kharagpur

ORGANIZING CHAIR
R K Bagga, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
Ashish Jacob Thomas, University of Hyderabad


8. CONTACT INFORMATION