CICLing Conference


	Announcements
	Feb 16		Some changes to the schedule (see a similar section of Announcements there).
	Feb 16		Weather: a bit better today, rather sunny, but still cold.
	Feb 15		Weather in Haifa: around 10-15C. Please be prepared, just in case, for possibly cold, windy and rainy weather, especially for the tours.
	Feb 10		This week A. Gelbukh is travelling to Israel and may not read him email (you can try calling him at cell phone). For urgent issues please contact Prof. Wintner: first at the address indicated here, and only if this does not work out and in case of real emergency, at his personal address or phone. For urgent organization issues, you can also try contacting Ms. Rona Perkis.
	Feb 10		For presentations, we will have a PC with PowerPoint and a PDF reader. Please have your presentation on a USB drive and upload it to the provided computer before the session, to save time between talks. If you need any special equipment please write to Prof. Wintner. For the poster session we will provide easels and pins.
	Feb 10		For the Sunday excursion, we will meet at the lobby of the Dan Panorama hotel at 8:00 am. Don't be late -- the bus cannot wait. On Monday, we will provide transportation from the Dan Panorama to the University. The bus will leave at 8:30am.
	Feb 10		LNCS book at the Springer's site is here. From the program page you can also download all abstracts in one file, as well as poster papers.
	Feb 9		Detailed program and related info: now includes a complete list of accepted papers including posters.
	Dec 20		Updated local information page is published. Before asking questions to local organizer, please check if this page does not contain an answer.

9^th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics

This conference is the ninth 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 conferences, 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 conference covers nearly all topics related to computational linguistics and text processing. This makes it attractive for people from different areas and leads to vivid and interesting discussions and exchange of opinions.

Informal interaction. The conference 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 even greet in the crowd at large conferences.

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

Participants' choice. At CICLing-2007 held in Mexico City, we asked the attendees to vote for the venue for the next (2008) event, offering them a wide variety of countries and regions. By the number of votes, Israel was the clear winner (followed by Mexico). Therefore it is not our choice, it is your choice!

Haifa is safe. Haifa is the third largest city of the country (1 million inhabitants metropolitan area) peacefully shared by Jewish (90%) and Arabic (9%) people. It is a prosperous city located in the North-West of the country, far from its problematic South-Eastern regions. Haifa is generally a safe city, and random crime, including petty crime, is rare.

Scientific capital. In spite of its 2300-years history, Haifa is a highly developed modern city famous for its science and technology development. It hosts two universities: the University of Haifa and Technion -- both hosting strong computational linguistics groups -- as well as research centers of Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Google, among others.

Touristically convenient location. Haifa is located between the Northern region with Christian holy places such as Sea of Galilee and Nazareth, and Central region with Jerusalem -- the holy place of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. We will have convenient tours to both regions. By the way, Haifa is the world's center of Bahá'í Faith whose holy place we will also visit.

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 to, the following topics, as long as the topic is presented in computer-related or formal description aspects:

We welcome the works on processing any language (not necessarily English) though major languages are of more general interest. When describing phenomena of languages other than English, please keep your discussion understandable for people not familiar with this language.

You can have a look at the contents of the past CICLing-2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000 proceedings 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.

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]

Deadline for registration of abstracts	passed
Deadline for uploading of full text of registered papers	passed
Notification of acceptance	passed
Camera-ready deadline	passed
Author and early registration (see here) deadline	passed
Conference	February 17 to 23

Paper submission is divided in two phases: first, the authors should express their interest by registering an abstract of the paper. At this stage, the full text is not yet required. The authors of registered papers should upload the full text of the paper by October 25.

Though we cannot guarantee processing of any paper that does not arrive by the corresponding deadline, you may contact us if you really cannot submit your paper in time, and we will see what can be done.

By submitting a paper, at least one author thereby promises, in case of acceptance, to attend the conference in person to present the paper and to pay the corresponding 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 (generally 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, and also must tick the group "[X] Discount or waiver is requested" in the web submission system. 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 material (including the proceedings) to participants with reduced fee. Also, in case of lack of seats in the excursion bus we will have to give preference to fully registered participants.

All papers accepted for oral presentation will be published in a proceedings volume edited by Springer-Verlag in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers accepted for poster presentation will be published in an IEEE CS Press volume or the journal "Research in Computing Science" (we may have both types of publication or one of them, which will be decided later, but before acceptance notification, so you will know exactly where your paper will appear).

Submissions are received electronically. See here the submission guidelines and a link to the web submission system.

Contact: See email options, fax, and the street address on www.CICLing.org/contact.html. Please avoid sending us any paper mail.

The papers accepted for the poster/demo session are anticipated to be published a special issue of the journal Research in Computing Science, ISSN 1870-4069 or an equivalent forum. See here the guidelines for submitting and preparing your poster.

There will be three and half days of technical program and three and half days of cultural program. If you don't have time for the cultural program, you can arrive on Monday and leave on Friday; you will miss some tours.

Each technical program day will open with keynote talk and end (probably except for Friday) with an academic special event organized by a keynote speaker.

NEW Detailed program and related info includes a complete list of accepted papers including posters. Also, abstracts of all papers, including the invited papers, are available from that page (in case of the posters published in RCS, the complete text is available).

Cultural events and tours are essential part of CICLing philosophy. They complement the technical program by providing better personal interaction between attendees and encouraging informal discussions and new contacts.

Here is the list of excursions. More details can be added later; some changes are possible.

Sunday, Feb 17: Tour to the North. A highly recommended full-day tour. It will include Beit She'arim

(an old Jewish burial site with underground catacombs), Beit Shean

(a beautifully preserved Roman city), Sea of Galilee (including some Christian holy places), and Nazareth

. Possibly Tabh'a, the Beatitude monastery ("Sermon on the Mountain").

Wednesday, Feb 20: Tour to Jerusalem. A wonderful one-day trip with most highlights. We will leave Haifa early in the morning on Wednesday to make a 2-hour trip to Jerusalem. This will be a day full of walking. We will see the Old City, Western Wall

, Via Dolorosa

, Church of the Holy Sepulture, Remnants of King David's City, the bazaar, then a few sites in the New City such as the Parliament and Supreme Court buildings and the Shrine of the Book, then drive back to Haifa and be there before 22:00.

Saturday, Feb 23: Walking tour of Haifa (tentative). We plan on a walking tour on Saturday 23 morning. We will start with a guided tour of the Bahai Gardens

, and continue on foot to the Arab Quarter (Wadi Nisnas) and some residential neighborhoods (Hadar HaCarmel). The tour will provide an opportunity to get to know Haifa, and Israel, informally.

All tours are very safe. If the situation changes, in no case will we compromise on safety: if there are any events going on we will just change our plans. See our Local Guide for maps and tourist info.

Welcome party: The welcome party will be combined with the Poster and Demo section. We plan to have some snack and maybe some wine (no music, no heavy food: this is not a banquet).

Dinner: The conference dinner followed by a cultural event is planned on Friday evening.

We suggest that it is convenient for the participants to stay in the same hotel, to facilitate informal interaction and transportation. Usually our participants form ad-hoc informal companies in the hotel reception to go to some restaurant, walking tours, etc. Also, we have discounted rates for the participants of the conference.

The official hotel of the conference is Dan Panorama (breakfast, wireless Internet in the room). We also reserved a limited number of rooms in the Ganei Dan hotel (very near to Dan Panorama), which is cheaper.

To get the discounted rate, please do not book your room in these hotels directly; we will do it for you. For this, we request additional information from you via the conference registration webpage. Other hotels are rather expensive (most of the hotels would have wireless Internet).

Unless noted otherwise, all the technical sessions will take place at the Ofer Observatory, on the 30th floor of the Eshkol Tower, University of Haifa.

See here information on getting to the conference place and some useful information about the city and the country.

Contact

Comments: A.Gelbukh.

* The conference is prepared with participation of CIC-IPN ACM student chapter.
A publication with IEEE CS Press Conference Publication Services is anticipated.
The use of the ACM and IEEE logos refers to these facts and
does not imply any other relationship with ACM or IEEE.


Ido Dagan		Eva Hajičová		Alon Lavie		Kemal Oflazer

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 Lexical resources
Intelligent text processing and applications:
Document classification and search Information retrieval Information extraction Text mining	Automatic summarization Spell checking Natural language interfaces

		Ido Dagan (Israel) Topic: Natural Language as the Basis for Meaning Representation and Inference.

		Eva Hajičová (Czech Rep.) Topic: What we are talking about and what we are saying about it?.

		Alon Lavie (Canada) Topic: Stat-XFER: a General Framework for Search-based Syntax-driven Machine Translation.

		Kemal Oflazer (Turkey) Topic: Statistical Machine Translation into a Morphologically Complex Language.

Hotel	CICLing	General public
Dan Panorama	$85	$122
Ganei Dan	$65	N/A