CIC Chapter *

CICLing-2005

Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics

February 13 to 19, 2005
Mexico City, Mexico

Endorsed by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Publication: Springer LNCS, vol. 3406.
Deadline: full papers: October 10, short papers: October 20
Keynote speakers: Ellen Riloff, Kevin Knight, Christian Boitet, Daniel Marcu
Excursions: Ancient pyramids, Monarch butterflies, great cave, and more

 NEW:  PHOTOS

Abstracts of accepted papers - Awards

Table of Contents - Author Index - Final Program

Awards

Call For Papers

This conference is the sixth CICLing event. The past CICLing conferences have been very successful, according to the comments of the participants: Fantastic conference! (Martin Kay, 2004), Everything was just great! Super-hyper-ultra-well done! (Igor Mel'cuk, 2000). We consider the following factors to define our identity:

   Excellent keynote speakers. We invite the most prominent scientists of the field to give keynote talks which, unlike at many other confs, are published in extenso in the Proceedings. They also organize an additional tutorial or discussion, and usually even participate in the excursions, where you can speak with them in an informal environment. [Past participants' opinions]

   General interest. The conf covers nearly all topics related to computational linguistics. This makes it attractive for people from different areas and leads to vivid and interesting discussions and exchange of opinions.

   Informal interaction. It is intended for a small group of professionals, some 50 participants. This allows for informal and friendly atmosphere, more resembling a friendly party than an official event. At CICLing you can pass hours speaking with your favorite famous scientists who you scarcely could greet in the crowd at large confs.

   Excellent excursions. Mexico is a wonderful country rich in culture, history, and nature. The conference is intended for people feeling themselves young in their souls, adventurous explorers in both science and life. Our cultural program brings the participants to unique marvels of history and nature hidden from the ordinary tourists.

   Relief from frosts. In the middle of February frosts, the participants from Northern countries can enjoy bright warm sun under the shadow of palms.

The conf is held at the Center for Computer Research (CIC) of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Mexico. The IPN is one of the largest universities in the world, with over 120,000 students. The CIC is a relatively new school devoted to the cutting edge research in all areas of science related to computers, both in software and hardware. The conf is organized by the Natural Language Processing laboratory of CIC (you can find some our publications at www.Gelbukh.com).

In general, we are interested in whatever helps, will help eventually, or might help computers meaningfully process language data.

The conference is intended to the exchange of opinions between the scientists working in different areas of the growing field of computational linguistics and intelligent text processing. Our idea is to get a general view of the state of art in computational linguistics and its applications.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited by, the following topics, as long as the topic is presented in computer-related or formal description aspects:

Computational linguistics research:

   Computational linguistic theories and formalisms

   Representation of linguistic knowledge

   Morphology

   Syntax

   Semantics

   Discourse models

   Ambiguity resolution

   Word Sense Disambiguation

   Anaphora resolution

   Text generation

   Machine translation

   Statistical methods in computational linguistics

   Corpus linguistics

   Lexical resources

Intelligent text processing and applications:

   Document classification and search

   Information retrieval

   Information extraction

   Text mining

   Automatic summarization

   Spell checking

   Natural language interfaces

Naturally, we welcome the works on processing any language, not necessarily English, though major languages are of more general interest. Note: when describing phenomena of languages other than English, please be sure to make your discussion understandable for people not familiar with this language.

You can have a look at the past CICLing-2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000 tables of contents to get an idea of our interests. If you are not sure whether your particular topic is of interest, please do not hesitate to ask us.

   Ellen Riloff (U. Utah)

Formal presentation:  to be announced.

Informal discussion/event: to be announced.

   Kevin Knight (ISI)

Formal presentation: An Overview of Probabilistic Tree Transducers for Natural Language Processing (with Jonathan Graehl).

Informal discussion/event: to be announced.

   Christian Boitet (CLIPS-IMAG, Grenoble)

Formal presentation: tentatively: Message automata for messages with variants, and methods for their translation.

Informal discussion/event: to be announced.

   Daniel Marcu (ISI)

Formal presentation:  Probabilistic Generative Models for Natural Language Processing and Reasoning.

Informal discussion/event: to be announced.

[Past participants' opinions]

The camera-ready deadline is firm. We do not guarantee the inclusion of any paper that does not arrive (in camera-ready version) by the deadline indicated above.

Authors of rejected full papers may be given a chance to re-submit their works as short papers well before November 10.

If for some reason you contact us for late submission, please indicate a tentative title of your paper.

Authors of accepted papers: By submitting a paper, at least one author thereby promises, in case of acceptance of the paper, to attend the conf in person to present the paper and to pay the corresponding early registration fee. Unless the current policy changes, the authors of accepted papers will register on-site at the early registration rate. Note: We reserve the right to change this information before November 10; please check our website.

Public (not authors): For early registration information, please contact us before November 10.

The registration will be on site, in cash (US$ or Mexican pesos). All authors will pay early fee. Those of general public who did not arrange with us the payment of the early fee, will pay full fee. Please do not send us any money, unless otherwise is explicitly agreed with us.

Registration fee:

On reduced registration fee: A very limited number of reduced registrations may be available. To apply, please contact us and thoroughly justify your application. Eligible for reduced registration can be people from underdeveloped countries in case if their institutions have real difficulties paying the full fee (included: Latin America, Eastern Europe; not included: North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea). Authors must apply for reduced registration (clearly indicating the amount of reduction) at the moment of submission of their paper for review; no new applications will be considered for already reviewed papers. Notes: (1) Though all papers are judged by strictly academic criteria, only for borderline cases and only of papers of comparable quality we may give preference to papers with paid fee. (2) Though we will do our best for this not to happen, we cannot guarantee providing the conf material (including the Proceedings) and the conf lunch tickets to participants with reduced fee. Also, in case of lack of seats in the excursion bus we will give preference to fully registered participants.

Publication

All accepted full and short papers will be published in a Proceedings volume edited by Springer-Verlag in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

The full papers should not exceed 12 pages, though we encourage you to keep it as short as possible (but not shorter!). If you really need more pages, please contact us.

Short papers should not exceed 4 pages and should, if possible, contain references to Internet sites where more detail on the work can be found. In all other respects the format of the short papers is identical to that of full papers.

Format

Please provide your paper in the form in which it should appear in the book (but without page numbers, running heads, and copyright note). Specifically, please do indicate the authors' names normally (we will take care of hiding them for blind review if needed).

If for some reason you really prefer to hide some information for blind review, please leave the exact space which it occupies. Or, just tell us to eliminate it from the PDF file before sending it to review.

Please strictly follow the format guidelines of Springer LNCS series (you can get the style files here). We cannot guarantee publication of any paper that does not follow these guidelines. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions.

The following are frequent formatting problems:

1.     Word users: Do not underline email addresses or URLs, and do not write them in blue font. See also below the notes on bugs in the Word template.

2.     All figures, tables, formulas, etc. must be within margins. We will not be able to include papers that do not meet this requirement.

3.     All pages must be free of page numbers and running heads.

4.     Please do not leave unused space on the pages. Try moving your figures if they cause unused space. Avoid if possible the last page being filled less than to 1/3.

5.     No section title should be the last line on the page. Avoid widow and orphan lines.

6.     The title and all section titles must be First Letter Capitalized.

7.     Figure captions must be below the figure; table captions must be above the table (especially important for TeX users). Both figures and tables should be centered.

8.     Do not use colors in figures: they will not be visible in paper book. Especially in Excel drawings, a blue and a red line will look equal, and a yellow line will not be visible at all. In Excel drawings, eliminate the outer frame, and make the background white (not grey), see below.

9.     For homogenous look of the book, please format the tables, whenever it does not cause difficulties in understanding the table, with only three thin horizontal lines:

9.     If the title of your paper does not fit in one line, please divide it into logical parts (with Shift-Enter in Word, or \\ in TeX):

Note for Word users: the template file sv-lncs.dot currently provided by Springer has the following bugs that you must correct in the text of your paper (if they affect you) in order for it to be published:

1.      All centered paragraphs (title, author, address, email, equation, etc.) and some other special paragraphs (table and figure captions) incorrectly have 0.4cm first line indentation, set it to 0 (not indented). This can be done through the menu by changing Format | Paragraph | Indenting | Special to none or (for expert users) by modifying the corresponding style.

2.      Bulleted lists seem to have a problem with the bullet character. You can choose another bullet character through the menu Format | Numbering and lists | Bulleted lists | Personalize or (only for expert users!) by modifying the corresponding style.

3.      Table captions should be centered; this can be changed through the menu by setting Format | Paragraph | Alignment to centered. Also, table caption style has German language, you might want to set it to English through Tools | Language | Define Language.

Submission

We accept only electronic submissions, which should be properly formatted. See also a note on reduced registration fee.

To submit a paper for review, send us both or any one of the following:

   PostScript or PDF file. With non-English characters, PostScript often works better.

   Source file in RTF, DOC, or LaTeX (in case of LaTeX, PostScript or PDF file is also required).

When sending us the camera-ready paper, please send all of the following:

   Source file in LaTeX or RTF (not in DOC). If you use LaTeX, then also send us all source files necessary for compilation of your paper at our side, such as EPS pictures and all style files. (Note that the use of custom style files is strongly discouraged.)

   PDF file (if you can produce it, then send us PostScript file). If you use LaTeX, then also the DVI file.

   Copyright form (see here) by fax (see contact info) or as a scanned image. In the Copyright form, indicate the following data:

Conference/book: CICLing-2005, Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing.

Volume Editor: Alexander Gelbukh. 

Please do not send us any hard copies, including the Copyright form.

If you are not sure whether some special symbols are printed correctly at our side, we encourage you to send us scanned images or fax the pages in question, clearly indicating what symbols are to be checked; e.g., you can draw a circle around the symbol(s) in question.

Contact

See email options, fax, and the street address on www.CICLing.org/contact.html.

Short papers

The papers can be submitted either as full papers or as short papers (also to be published in the Proceedings). The authors of short papers will present their works as posters or demos. Whenever possible, a short paper should give references to Internet sites where more detailed info on the work can be found.

The authors of some of the rejected full papers will be encouraged to re-submit their works as short papers. They will be given several days to convert their rejected full paper into a short paper. All short papers (including the re-submitted ones) are subject to a strict reviewing process.

Publication format:All accepted short papers will be published in the Proceedings by Springer-Verlag and thus must be prepared in the required format. In particular, they must have the same sections as a full paper: title, abstract, references. They must follow Springer requirements. The only difference between full and short papers is the length (and the modality of presentation).

Poster/demo format: Short papers will present them as posters and/or demos. You will be given approximately 2 square meters of vertical surface to attach your material. If you have some special requirements, please let us know. Please put your photo in a visible place on your poster (or main page of your demo) for people to easier locate you while you are looking at others' papers. The following common-sense advice improves your presentation:

For a poster

   Arrange individual pages vertically, in columns, from top to bottom. Horizontal arrangement of pages makes the readers to zigzag when reading your material. Please number pages clearly to indicate the direction of reading.

   Use large font, at least 20 pt, and much larger for headings. Note that you probably will explain your poster to several or many people at the same time.

   Have detailed and additional material handy, though do not attach it together with your main material. It is a good idea to prepare some sufficient number of handouts.

For a demo

   Have a working program, not a PowerPoint presentation (which should constitute your poster instead).

   Prepare some plan of your demonstration, including some examples tested in advance.

   Prepare all necessary input files in advance, even if small. On the other hand, give the users a chance to test their own examples and to play with your program’s options and features.

   If possible, have handy some floppies or CDs with your program and documentation to give out to the participants. Clearly indicate your name and email on these disks. Indicate the web page where more info can be found.

Presentation: The Poster/Demo presentations can be given during short breaks and after the end of the regular talks. On the first working day of the conf, the Poster/Demo session will be combined with the Welcome party.

Demos

During the same poster/demo sessions, all participants will be able to demonstrate the material related to their talks or posters.

You are encouraged to bring your laptop with your demo. Demo platforms provided by the organizers: PC with Windows 2000/ME/XP (by our choice, no guarantee of some specific version), CD and floppy drives; no significant space on the disk is guaranteed. If you need a specific version of Windows or some another OS or platform please contact the Committee in advance. Similarly, if you need some significant disk space, Internet access, or any special hardware or software.

See submission deadlines in the section Important Dates.

The following schedule and, in particular, the list of excursions and their exact dates is tentative.

There will be four working days and three days of excursions. You can arrive on Monday and leave on Friday if you wish; you will lose two excursions.

  February 13, Sunday: Excursion to Teotihuacan: ancient Indian pyramids.

  February 14, Monday: Registration. Talks. Welcome party.

  February 15, Tuesday: Talks.

  February 16, Wednesday: NEW parallel options: (1) Excursion to Angangueo: Monarch Butterfly wintering site. (2) UNL workshop. (3) City tour including Anthropological Museum.

  February 17, Thursday: Talks.

  February 18, Friday: Talks and/or discussions. (Excursion to the Anthropological Museum is NEW moved to Wednesday.)

  February 19, Saturday: Excursion to Cacahuamilpa and Taxco: very large cave and colonial city.

We will try to arrange for an alternative excursion to the City Center on Wednesday; no guarantee yet.

Note for the participants of past CICLing events held in Mexico: I apologize for repeating the same excursions. I advise you two options: either to stay just from Monday to Friday or to arrive earlier and visit some very interesting places to which we cannot organize an excursion, for example: Tula (2 hours by bus), El Tajin (7 hours); or: arrive to Cancun and visit Chichen-Iza, Uxmal, Palenque, La Venta-Villahermosa traveling to Mexico City (2 nights in bus, 3 days of sightseeing). There are many other good options if you are adventurous enough and can rent a car or pass nights in the buses. Please ask me for more info.

See the list of accepted papers and the program.

Excursions

The preliminary schedule of the excursions can be found in the conference program (when ready).

One of the most exciting things at the conference are excursions to the ancient Indian pyramids and visiting a unique natural phenomenon, the Monarch Butterfly wintering site where you can see millions of beautiful butterflies in the trees and in the air around you. In common opinion of the participants of the previous events the excursions were excellent; you can see their own photos: CICLing-2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, as well as Ted’s site.

Warning: the excursion to the butterflies site is very long and tiresome, especially for elder people. We think it is worth the trouble, but you decide. What is more, the population of the butterflies changes from year to year. We will try to arrange for an alternative informal excursion to the city center at the same time as the excursion to the butterflies site.

 NEW Note: Please bring with your (valid) Student / Professor / Teacher ID, and have it with you at all excursions.

Here is the tentative list of excursions:

   Excursion to Teotihuacan: ancient Indian pyramids, 1 hour drive, much (but slow) walking

   Excursion to Angangueo: Monarch Butterfly wintering site, 4 hours drive, hard walking up the hill

   Excursion to the City Center; tentative and informal NEW combined with Excursion to the Anthropological Museum; in parallel with Butterfly excursion and UNL workshop (as mutually exclusive options).

   Excursion to Cacahuamilpa and Taxco: great cave and colonial city, 2 hours drive, much (slow) walking. Probably we will also visit the Xochicalco ancient pyramids.

Note for past CICLing participants: I do understand that repeating the same excursions is a bad idea. On the other hand, these are the best ones, and significantly changing the list would not be fair to the new participants. If you have any specific idea on what you would like to visit, please let us know and we will try to arrange for this.

We are open to any ideas on what other excursions would be interested. Please let us know your ideas.

Welcome party

The reception party will be combined with the Poster and Demo section. We will have some snack, maybe some wine. (No music, no real food, even no tables, sorry. We consider official banquets waste of your valuable time.) You will enjoy the informal atmosphere to speak with each other and with the presenters of the posters and demos. You will also have a chance to show and discuss your own programs (for this, please let us know your software and hardware requirements).

We suggest that it is convenient for the participants to stay in the same hotel, to facilitate informal interaction. Usually our participants form ad-hoc informal companies in the hotel reception to go to some restaurant, walking tours, etc. We will provide free transportation from the recommended hotel to the conf place. Also, we will try to get discounted rates for the conf participants.

The recommended hotel is **** El Ejecutivo: it is affordable, nice, and located in the central district. Address: Av. Viena # 8, Colonia Juarez, Mexico DF, 06600. Tel. +52 (55) 5566-6422, 5566-6565, fax for reservations +52 (55) 5535-5088. Here you also can see a booklet with some info and a local map, and here the other side of the booklet. See also our local transportation guide.

Rates (approximately; we are negotiating probably better rates):

   Single: US$47 per night,

   Double: $51 (shared $25/person) per night.

   Triple: $57 (shared $19/person) per night.

 NEW  Rates confirmed:

You do not need to reserve your room; we will do it for you. Please send us a message well in advance indicating:

   your name,

   dates: from what day to what day you will stay in the hotel,

   type of the room (single, double, triple, JR suite, Master suite),

   the number of persons,

   whether you prefer to share the room with other persons (e.g., you can indicate a shared triple room for one person; we will try to find someone to share the room with you, though no guarantee!),

   for shared rooms: male or female,

   any other indications (e.g., with whom you would prefer to share the room, etc.).

Here you can find the following information:

   How to get to the recommended hotel,

   How to get to CIC, the conf place,

   Useful local information: currency and credit cards, transportation, phones, food, museums, security.

Program Committee

1. Boitet, Christian, France

2. Bolshakov, Igor, Mexico

3. Bontcheva, Kalina, UK

4. Calzolari, Nicoletta, Italy

5. Campbell, Nick, Japan

6. Carroll, John, UK

7. Cristea, Dan, Romania

8. Gelbukh, Alexander (chair), Mexico

9. Hallett, Catalina, UK

10. Han, SangYong, Korea

11. Harada, Yasunari, Japan

12. Hovy, Eduard, USA

13. Kharrat, Alma, USA

14. Kilgarriff, Adam, UK

15. Kittredge, Richard, USA / Canada

16. Kuebler, Sandra, Germany

17. Lopez-Lopez, Aurelio, Mexico

18. Maegaard, Bente, Denmark

19. Martin-Vide, Carlos, Spain

20. Mel’cuk, Igor, Canada

21. Metais, Elisabeth, France

22. Mihalcea, Rada, USA/Romania

23. Mitkov, Ruslan, UK

24. Murata, Masaki, Japan

25. Nevzorova, Olga, Russia

26. Nirenburg, Sergei, USA

27. Palomar, Manuel, Spain

28. Pedersen, Ted, USA

29. Pekar, Viktor, UK

30. Piperidis, Stelios, Greece

31. Pustejovsky, James, USA

32. Ren, Fuji, Japan

33. Sag, Ivan, USA

34. Sharoff, Serge, UK

35. Sidorov, Grigori, Mexico

36. Sun Maosong, China

37. Tait, John, UK

38. Trujillo, Arturo, UK

39. T’sou Ka-yin, Benjamin, Hong Kong

40. Van Guilder, Linda, USA

41. Verspoor, Karin, USA / The Netherlands

42. Vilares Ferro, Manuel, Spain

43. Wilks, Yorick, UK

Best Paper Award Selection Working Group

1. Gelbukh, Alexander (coordinator)

2. Hovy, Eduard

3. Mihalcea, Rada

4. Pedersen, Ted

5. Wiks, Yorick

Organizing committee

1. Arreola Ceja, Arturo

2. Ayala, Juan Antonio

3. Calvo Castro, Hiram

4. Cu Tinoco, José Ángel

5. García Araoz, Ignacio

6. Gelbukh, Alexander (chair)

7. Muñoz Porras, Valentina

8. Haro Martínez, Martín

9. Sandoval Reyes, Alejandro

10. Torres Frausto, Raquel

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