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CICLing 2009

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Lexicom Americas 2009

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

CICLing: March 1-7, Lexicom: February 24-28
Mexico City, Mexico

Publication: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Poster session: a separate publication in extenso
Deadline: due to announcement of a new keynote speaker,  NEW  late submissions are still welcome!
Keynote speakers:  Jill Burstein, ETS; Ken Church, Mictosoft; Dekang Lin, Google;
 NEW  Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
Tours: Ancient pyramids, Monarch butterflies, great cave, and more
Awards: Best Paper, Best Presentation, Best Poster awards

Included in: ISI Proceedings (list), EI Compendex (info), CORE conf list
Endorsement by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) applied for

Jill Burstein ETS		Ken Church Microsoft		Dekang Lin Google (his Google page)		Bernardo Magnini FBK-irst

Call For Papers

This conference is the tenth 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 experts to give keynote talks which, unlike at many other conferences, are published in extenso in the proceedings. These expert also organize an additional tutorials or discussions, and usually participate in the tours and social life, where you can speak with them in an informal environment. [Past participants' feedback]

   Prestigious publication. CICLing is included in the CORE list of conferences, which is important at some universities for promotion scoring. The Springer LNCS series is distributed to hundreds of libraries worldwide and is indexed by major indices.

   General interest. The conference 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. 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 most famous experts who you could hardly greet in the crowd at larger conferences.

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

   Relief from frosts. In the middle of winter frosts, the attendees from Northern countries enjoy bright warm sun under the shadow of palms.

The conference is hosted 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 about 200 thousand students. The CIC is a relatively new school devoted to the cutting edge research in all areas of computer science and engineering. The conference is organized by the Natural Language Processing Laboratory of CIC (see some our publications at nlp.cic.ipn.mx) in collaboration with the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA).

We are interested in whatever helps, will help eventually, or might help computers to meaningfully process language data. The conference promotes exchange of opinions between experts working in different areas of the growing field of computational linguistics and intelligent text processing. Our aim 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:

You can have a look at the past CICLing 2008, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 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.

A distinguishing feature of CICLing is that apart from giving a formal talk, our keynote speakers contribute a paper in extenso to the proceedings, and also organize an informal special event: a discussion, tutorial, experiment, or something just interesting, funny, or amusing. [Past participants' feedback]

		Jill Burstein, ETS Topic to be announced.
		Ken Church, Microsoft Topic to be announced.
		Dekang Lin (his Google page), Google Topic to be announced.
		NEW  Bernardo Magnini FBK-irst Fast prototyping of QA systems: How to get an answer from questions.

* The submission deadline has passed, but due to announcement of a new keynote speaker,  late submissions are welcome while the system is open . Please register your abstract ASAP, and they upload the full paper when you can. Though we cannot give any guarantee, we will do our best to consider all submissions received while the system is open for submissions.

 NEW  Please fill in the Registration form.

By submitting a paper, at least one author promises, in case of acceptance of the paper, to attend the conf in person to present the paper and to pay the registration fee. The payment will be in cash (dollars or euros) on site.

Discount. A very limited number of reduced registrations may be available. To apply, please contact us thoroughly justifying your application. Eligible for reduced registration are people from underdeveloped countries, if their institutions have really cannot pay 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 and reason) before submission of their paper. No applications will be considered for already reviewed papers. Though all papers are judged by strictly academic criteria, for borderline papers of comparable quality we may give preference to papers with fully paid fee. We also cannot guarantee availability of material (including the proceedings), lunch tickets, and tour seats to participants with reduced fee. In return for

All papers accepted for the oral presentation will be published in a proceedings volume edited by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Poster session papers will be published in the posters session proceedings. Submissions are to be original research papers, written in English, not published elsewhere and not submitted for review for another conference or journal.

Size. Papers should not exceed 12 pages and should not be too short. A small additional fee will be charged for additional pages exceeding this limit. Please contact us if you exceed the limit by more than 2 pages. The additional fee is charged for the pages exceeding the page limit in either the version submitted for review or in the camera-ready version, whichever is greater. In particular, you ought not to shorten the camera-ready version in comparison with the version submitted for review unless the reviewers required this; in any case such shortening would not reduce the fee. No short paper modality is offered; poster session papers will be published separately, as full-text papers.

Format. Please provide your paper exactly as it should appear in the book, with the following exceptions: it should not contain page numbers, running heads, and copyright note, as well as the authors' names (see below). Please strictly follow the Springer LNSC format guidelines; we cannot guarantee publication of any paper that does not follow these guidelines. Avoid the frequent formatting problems; from this link you can also download the format templates.

Double blind review policy. The review procedure is double blind. Thus papers submitted at review stage must not contain the authors' names, affiliations, or any information that may disclose the authors' identity. In particular, in the review version avoid explicit auto-references. You may cite your own previous works provided that it is not deducible from the text that the cited work is yours. When citing your previous work, do keep the names:

Incorrect:			In [1] we have shown ... 1. <Hidden for review>, Syntactic Structures, The Hague, Mouton, 1957.
Correct:			In [1] it has been shown ... 1. Chomsky, N., Syntactic Structures, The Hague, Mouton, 1957.

Submission procedure. We accept only electronic submissions via the submission page. Submission is done in two steps. Before the registration of abstracts deadline, you should register your paper. You only need a tentative abstract at this stage (the abstract can be improved later; here we need the abstract only to judge on the topic of your paper to assign it appropriate reviewers). Later, before the  uploading of full text deadline, you should upload a PDF file with the complete paper. We cannot guarantee that a new paper can be registered at this stage. We will consider, though, all papers submitted while the system is open to receive submissions (even submitted after the deadline); if the system is closed, contact us for late submission.

When registering your paper, please indicate:

• Whether the first author is a full-time student. This will be taken into account for selecting candidates for the best student paper award.

• Whether you plan to pay a student fee and/or request fee waver. If you request fee waver, read carefully the explanation. No student fee, fee waver, or discount application will be considered later if you have not ticked the corresponding option when registering your paper. Specifically, not marking the student fee option implies that you will pay the full fee.

• Whether you paper should not be considered for poster presentation and publication the poster session proceedings in case if it is not accepted for oral presentation and LNCS proceedings.

• Topics and keywords. Choose as many as applicable (you can indicate several topics). This will allow us greater freedom in assigning correct reviewers for your paper.

If you have read and understood the above instructions, then you are ready to enter the:

SUBMISSION SYSTEM

Note: There is a compatibility issue with some versions of Firefox.
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Contact. See email options, fax, and the street address on www.CICLing.org/contact.html.

Poster session

The papers accepted for the poster/demo session will be published in a separate proceedings volume. 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 daythe 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 XP; no significant space on the disk is guaranteed; Internet access expected. 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.

See submission deadlines in the section Important Dates.

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

The general schedule is as follows:

  Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday: excursions.

  Monday morning, Tuesday, Thursday: talks.

  Monday evening: welcome party, posters, and demos.

Note for the participants of past CICLing events held in Mexico: we plan to repeat nearly the same excursions; I apologize for inconvenience. 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.

Here is a draft of the program and abstracts of the accepted papers. Here is the detailed schedule for the remaining days.

Tours. One of the most exciting things at the conference are tours 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 the opinion of the attendees of the previous events the tours were excellent; you can see their own photos: CICLing-2000, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 2007, and Ted’s site.

Warning: the tour to the butterflies site is very long and tiresome, especially for elder people. We really think it is very worth the trouble, but you decide. Note that population of the butterflies changes from year to year, so we cannot guarantee any particular number (or presence) of the butterflies.

Note: Please at all tours have a (valid) Student / Professor / Teacher ID.

Here is a tentative list of tours:

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

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

   Informal short walk by the City Center ("Zocalo").

   Tour to the Anthropological Museum.

   Tour to Xochicalco ancient pyramids, Cacahuamilpa cave and colonial city Taxco, 2+1+1 hours drive, much walking.

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

Welcome party. The welcome party will be combined with the poster and demo section. We will have some snack, maybe some wine; no music, no heavy food, no tables. 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).

It is convenient for the attendees to stay in the same hotel, to facilitate informal interaction: usually our attendees get together in the hotel reception to go to some restaurant, walking around, etc. We provide discounted rates and free transportation from the recommended hotel to the conference place.

 NEW  The hotel is Tulip Inn Ritz (do not book through this website!); the rate is less than 40 dollars. See notes in the Registration form.

Here you can find the following information:

   How to get to CIC, the conference place,

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

Program Committee (confirmed; more to be announced)