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CICLing-2006

Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics

February 19 to 25, 2006, Mexico City, Mexico

Publication: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Deadline (full and short papers): Abstract: October 17 (passed); main text: October 24 (passed).
Keynote speakers: Eduard Hovy, Nancy Ide, Rada Mihalcea.
Excursions: Ancient pyramids, Monarch butterflies, great cave, and more.
Awards: Best Paper award, Best Presentation award, Best Poster award.

Endorsed by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

In celebration of 70^th Anniversary of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN),
15^th Anniversary of International Conference on Computing (CIC), and
10^th Anniversary of the Center for Computing Research (CIC-IPN)
In conjunction with Magnum Conference on Computing

Call For Papers

This conference is the seventh 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 rather small group of professionals. 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 conferences.

   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 organized by 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-2005, 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.

		Eduard Hovy Director of the Natural Language Group at ISI; Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division of ISI; Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at USC; Director of Research for the Digital Government Research Center (DGRC). Topic: Integrating Semantic Frames from Multiple Sources.  NEW:  Additional topic: Toward Semantic Corpora: Creating Concepts from Words via Senses, and Storing them in an Ontology.  NEW:  Informal event: An Exercise in Lexical Semantics: Concept Creation and Validation from Words via Senses.
		Nancy Ide Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, and Chercheur Associé, Equipe Langue et Dialogue, LORIA/CNRS. Topic: Making Senses: Bootstrapping Sense-tagged Lists of Semantically-Related Words.
		Rada Mihalcea Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of North Texas. Topic: Random Walks on Text Structures.

Traditionally, our keynote speakers give a formal talk, which is also published in extenso in the Proceedings, and also organize a "special event" (a discussion, tutorial, experiment, or something just interesting). Such events, as well as publication of the keynote talks in the Proceedings, are distinguishing features of CICLing.

[Past participants' opinions]

The deadlines are firm; we do not guarantee consideration of any paper not received by the deadline. Deadlines are the same for full and short papers. Submission is split in two stages:

   First, you must register your paper; at this moment you should provide only its tentative abstract (later you can make changes to both title and abstract, provided that the topic and main points do not change significantly). Do not confuse this one-paragraph abstract with a short paper. Both full and short papers are to be registered with a one-paragraph abstract by October 17 (extended); it is the length of the main text (to be submitted by October 24) that differs full and short papers.

   One week later, you submit the full text of your paper, complete and in the required format; no changes will be permitted in camera-ready version except those requested by the reviewers. No (extended) abstracts will be considered for review at this stage. Papers for which the abstracts were not received by the first deadline will not be considered: you cannot submit a paper on October 24 if you did not submit its abstract by October 17.

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. The authors of accepted papers will register on-site at the early registration rate.

Public (not authors): For early registration information, please contact us before the early registration deadline, clearly indicating that you are not an author of accepted paper.

The registration will be paid on site, in cash (US$ or Mexican pesos); we are also working on providing a way to pay on site with a credit card. 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.

More payment options may be announced here later.

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 discount amount) before submission of their paper; 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) between papers of comparable quality we may give preference to papers with fully 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.

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). However, since the review process is blind, please do not indicate the author names or any information that may disclose the authors' identity (obviously, in the camera-ready version you should indicate the names).

Please strictly follow the format guidelines of Springer LNSC 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.     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 the same, 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 procedure

We accept only electronic submissions, which should be properly formatted. See a note on reduced registration fee. All papers are to be registered and uploaded through the submission page.

SUBMISSION PAGE

Camera-ready version and copyright form

Camera-ready version is submitted through the same submission page. Please strictly follow the instruction therein. Please note that the main file (RTF file in case of Word) must be in the root of the ZIP archive, not in a folder within it; other files can be in folders. In case of LaTeX, include all source files necessary for compilation of your paper at our side, such as all eps, bib, bst, sty and all other source files, as well as the DVI file (note that the use of custom style files is strongly discouraged). If you are not sure whether some special symbols are printed correctly at our side, we encourage you to include a scanned image of the corresponding page (or paragraph), clearly indicating what symbols are to be checked -- say, draw a circle around the symbol(s) in question; please indicate in the file name the corresponding page number.

Copyright form is here. According to the new policy of Springer, you must fax it to us (please do not send us a scanned image or hard copy). It is very important that you choose the correct fax number. Please choose the fax number according to the last digit of your paper number: e.g., if your paper is 123 then please choose the number corresponding to "3" (if this number does not respond, please use the next one):

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 (not oral presentation). Short papers are subject to the same strict reviewing as full papers. Whenever possible, a short paper should give references to Internet sites where more detailed info on the work can be found.

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 structure as a full paper: title, abstract, and 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 and RCS journal papers will be presented as posters and/or demos. For posters, 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' posters and demos. 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 play with your program’s options.

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

Presentation: All posters and demos will be presented during the Poster/Demo session (combined with the Welcome party) on the first working day of the conference. Later, they can also be demonstrated during breaks to interested attendees.

Demos

During the poster/demo session and breaks, all participants will have a chance to demonstrate the material related to their talks or posters. However, the number of PCs for demonstration will be limited; please contact us in advance if you need one. 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, as well as if you need some significant disk space, Internet access, or any special hardware or software.