ICON 2018

ICON 2018 : 15th International Conference on Natural Language Processing

Punjabi University, Patiala, India
15th - 18th December, 2018

News/Updates

Tutorial New

Accommodation New

Suitable free accommodation will be provided on first come first served basis by the organizers of ICON 2018. For Accommodation, please click here Accommodation Request

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 15th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2018) will be held at Punjabi University, Patiala during December 15-18, 2018. The ICON Conference series is a forum for promoting interaction among researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL) in India and abroad. The main conference is on December 16-17, 2018. This will be preceded by one day of pre-conference tutorials on December 15, 2018 and one day of post conference workshops on December 18, 2018.

Papers in ICON proceedings will be indexed in ACL Anthology. ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in Computational Linguistics for major international conferences under Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which is one of the most well-known associations for NLP and CL. The previous proceedings of ICON 2014, ICON 2015, ICON 2016 and ICON 2017 can be found in ACL Anthology.

TOPICS

Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on South Asian languages and other less resourced languages, issues, and applications relevant to South Asia. Papers on other languages of the world are also invited. The areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Discourse POS Tagging Parsing Word Sense Disambiguation Machine Translation/Statistical Machine Translation Pragmatics Computational or Quantitative Psycho linguistics Statistical Methods Knowledge-based Methods Annotation and Annotated Corpora Lexical Resources Ontology Sentiment Analysis Machine Learning in NLP NLP-based Recommendation Systems Performance Evaluation of NLP Systems Information Retrieval Information Extraction Automatic Text Summarization Question Answering Natural Language Generation Dialog Systems Speech Corpora Speech Recognition Speech Synthesis NLP for Language Documentation and Preservation NLP for Educational Purposes NLP for Digital Humanities Social Media Analytics

The authors have to submit papers under any of the areas mentioned above and must mark the topic(s) of their paper at the time of submission.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSION

Papers in English, not exceeding 8 pages, should be submitted on the ONLINE PORTAL at Microsoft CMT. Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200 words. Please follow the paper submission template details described in next section.

There are two tracks: one for the main conference and one for the Student Paper Competition. You should select one of these while submitting the paper (not both). For the NLP Software Contest, abstract submission will be through the special website made for this contest (see below).

DOUBLE BLIND REVIEW:

Papers in electronic form in the PDF format, anonymous for double blind review, should be submitted. If your paper contains text of languages other than English, all the non English text should be in Unicode only.

Paper Submission Template

Submission is electronic, using the Microsoft CMT. The submission site is open at:

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICON2018  

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2018 style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.

Style files were updated on 14th April, 2018 to clarify the location of supplementary material. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files.

Templates links

acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-latex.zip
acl2018.org/downloads/acl_natbib.bst
acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-word.zip

CALL FOR TUTORIALS/WORKSHOPS

Proposals are invited for pre/post-conference tutorials/workshops. 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.

Workshops on linguistic aspects of South Asian languages are also welcome.

Send tutorial/workshop proposals to the ICON-2018 Secretariat by email iconnlp[AT]pbi[dot]ac[dot]in. For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2018 Secretariat.
Tutorials Schedule

NLP Software Contest

The NLP Software contest, which is being held for first time in ICON, is intended to encourage and promote the development of NLP related software. The researchers, software developers and educators working in development of NLP software are invited to participate in the contest, by submitting a one page abstract of their software. Only independently running complete systems are eligible for the contest. Small Modules or tools developed for NLP Research or integration with larger systems will not be considered. Entries will be selected for inclusion in the conference program based on peer-review. The criteria for judging submissions include broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other miscellaneous factors. Authors of selected entries will be invited to present and demonstrate their software in a special session in the conference program. To encourage the development of NLP software, the best three software entries, as judged by reviewers and the program committee, will be awarded cash prize as follows:

  1. FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
  2. SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
  3. THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-

The abstracts may be submitted under the link on the web page.

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICON2018  

For any clarifications, contact NLP Software Contest Chair.

STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

ICON-2018 announces STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION in two tracks:

  1. Track I : NLP (All areas)
  2. 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 based on original work carried out. The prizes are:

  1. FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
  2. SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
  3. 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 iconnlp[AT]pbi[dot]ac[dot]in

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission Deadline July 15, 2018 August 10, 2018
Paper Acceptance Notification Oct 1, 2018 Oct 15, 2018
Camera Ready Copy Submission Oct 25, 2018
Tutorial/Workshop Proposals Submission July 15, 2018 August 10, 2018
Tutorial/Workshop Acceptance Notification Aug 25, 2018
NLP Software Contest Submission Deadline July 15, 2018 August 10, 2018
NLP Software Contest Acceptance Notificaton September 25, 2018
Student Paper Competition Submission Deadline July 15, 2018 August 10, 2018
Student Paper Acceptance Notification Oct 1, 2018 Oct 15, 2018

COMMITTEES

Conference General Chair

  • Rajeev Sangal, IIT-BHU, Varanasi, India

Programme Chair

  • Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Punjabi University, Patiala, India (Chair)
  • Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT Hyderabad, India (Co-Chair)

Programme Committee

  • Srinivas Bangalore, Interactions LLC, AT&T Research, USA
  • Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research, India
  • Harald Hammarström, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
  • Jyoti Pawar, DCST, Goa University, India
  • Owen Rambow, University of Columbia, USA
  • Elizabeth Sherly, IIITM-K,Trivandrum, India
  • Keh-Yih Su, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
  • Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research, India
  • Rajesh Bhatt, University of Massachusetts, USA
  • Pushpak Bhattacharyya, IIT Patna, India
  • L Ramamoorthy, CIIL Mysore, India
  • Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Université de Caen, Normandie, France
  • Vasudeva Varma, IIIT Hyderabad, India

NLP Software Contest

  • M. D. Kulkarni, CDAC Pune, India (Chair)
  • Rajeev R.R., ICFOSS Thiruvananthapuram, India (Co-Chair)

Student Paper Competition

  • Sanjay Dwivedi, BBAU (Central University Lucknow), India (Chair)
  • Sarika Jain, NIT Kurukshetra, India (Co-Chair)

Organizing Committee

  • Vishal Goyal, Punjabi University Patiala, India
  • Gurpreet Singh Joshan, Punjabi University Patiala, India
  • Tejinder Singh Saini, Punjabi University Patiala, India
  • Ankur Rana, Punjabi University Patiala, India

Keynote Lecture

  • Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Director and Professor of Computer Sc and Engg, IIT Patna, India
    "saathi haath baDaanaa": Cooperative Natural Language Processing

    This talk will focus how languages of the world an help one another to develop insight into processes and structures in computational linguistics, as well as create useful language technology systems. Language divergence is a reality- different languages express meaning differently (e.g., SVO-SOV-VSO, participials-clauses, agglutination-isolating-inflexional and so on). Still languages have universals and an underlying unity, which allows leveraging resources and tools created for language L1 for the NLP of language L2. In the current presentation we will illustrate this "cooperative NLP" by picking up problems in different NLP areas like WSD, IR, NER, Sentiment Analysis and so on. It is hoped that such studies and discussions will reduce system building efforts and thereby bring more languages into the fold of NLP.

  • Mr. Sanjeev Gupta Mr. Sanjeev Gupta, Flipkart, Bangalore
    NLP and impact on ecommerce: The Flipkart Way

    Artifical intelligence has changed the way we look at the problems today. Abundance of data in the form of information has fuelled this technology. NLP, being one of the tenant of AI is shaping the industries in a peculiar way and led to evolution of many smaller companies as well. We at Flipkart embraced it fully and invested heavily. This talk will showcase some of these investments along with one interesting case study.

Sponsors

Cinque Terre

Microsoft Research India

Cinque Terre

Flipkart

Cinque Terre

Central Institute of Indian Languages

Cinque Terre

Department Of Science & Technology

CONTACT INFORMATION

ICON-2018 Secretariat
Research Centre for Punjabi Language and Technology
Punjabi University, Patiala
Punjab, Pin-147002, India
Mobile: +91-98154-73767 (Dr. G. S. Lehal),
        +91-95010-96111 (Dr. Vishal Goyal),
e-mail: iconnlp[AT]pbi[dot]ac[dot]in
URL: http://icon2018.in