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

The conference is intended to encourage 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, provided that the work is presented in computer-related or formal description aspects:

We welcome works on processing any language (not necessarily English), though major languages are of more general interest. When discussing 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 proceedings of past CICLing events to get an idea of our interests. If not sure whether your topic is of interest, please 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 distinctive features of CICLing. [Past participants' opinions]

		Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester Keynote talk: Enhancing Search: Events and their Discourse Context Event-based search systems have become of increasing interest. This talk provides an overview of recent advances in event-based text mining, with an emphasis on the biomedical and social history domains. In particular, the talk will cover the enrichment of events with information relating to their interpretation according to surrounding textual and discourse contexts. I will describe our annotation scheme used to capture this information at the event level, report on the corpora that have so far been enriched according to this scheme and provide details of our experiments to recognise this information automatically. Special event: NLP web services for dummies My team is very wired up with interoperability and web services. We have developed a platform called U-Compare which is basically a library of processing components and resources in different languages. It has also figured in the Meta-net network. So an idea is to divide the interested participants of the conference either into language groups (Spanish, Portuguese, English, Romanian, Catalan, Maltese, French, etc ) or into language component groups (parsing, NER, tagging, etc) and ask them to play with the different components and come up with different workflows which will be exported as web services. This will happen via a GUI (so no programming). We will give a quick introduction and demo and then we can have fun. Requirements: one laptop for each group, wifi, Java 1.6 and voila.
		Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp Keynote talk: Explanation in Computational Stylometry Computational stylometry, as in authorship attribution or profi ling, has a large potential for applications in diverse areas: literary science, forensics, language psychology, sociolinguistics, even medical diagnosis. Yet, many of the basic research questions of this field are not studied systematically or even at all. In this presentation I will show how a machine learning framework can help computational stylometry escape from the limitations of a text categorisation approach. I will also show how better feature selection and error analysis can lead to more explanation in computational stylometry. I will illustrate with recent projects at CLiPS on computational stylometry for personality profiling and internet security. Special event: The CICLing Would I Lie to You Show In this session you will learn a bit about detecting deception in text, but you will also learn some interesting stories about your colleagues.
		Roberto Navigli, Sapienza University of Rome Keynote talk: BabelNet and OntoLearn Reloaded: two "juicy" perspectives on lexical knowledge acquisition In the information society, lexical knowledge is a key skill for understanding and decoding an ever-changing world. Indeed, lexical knowledge is an essential component not only for human understanding of text, but also for natural language driven tasks such as automated text understanding, information retrieval and question answering. Unfortunately, building such lexical knowledge resources manually is an onerous task requiring dozens of years - and furthermore it has to be repeated from scratch for each new language. In this talk I present two different approaches to lexical knowledge acquisition. In the first part, I will present BabelNet 1.1, a very large multilingual semantic network and ontology (www.babelnet.org). This lexical resource is created automatically by linking the largest multilingual Web encyclopedia – i.e., Wikipedia – to the most popular computational lexicon of English – i.e., WordNet. The integration is performed via an automatic mapping and by filling in lexical gaps in resource-poor languages with the aid of Machine Translation. The result is an "encyclopedic dictionary" that provides more than 5.5 million babel synsets, i.e., concepts and named entities lexicalized in many languages and connected by large amounts of semantic relations. In the second part of the talk we will move to a more extreme setting, where taxonomically-structured knowledge is extracted from domain corpora with minimal human intervention (i.e. the identification of a small set of upper level abstract concepts). Our approach to ontology learning, called OntoLearn Reloaded (lcl.uniroma1.it/ontolearn_reloaded), learns both concepts and relations entirely from scratch via the automated extraction of terms, definitions and hypernyms. This results in a very dense, cyclic and possibly disconnected hypernym graph. The algorithm then induces a taxonomy from the graph. Our experiments show that we obtain high-quality results, both when reconstructing WordNet sub-hierarchies and when building brand-new taxonomies in specialized domains. Special event: Playing with words and senses in different languages We will have an interactive online session on playing linguistic games involving words and senses in different languages. A discussion will follow. Please come with your laptop! Fun is guaranteed!
		Michael Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton Keynote talk: Damping Sentiment Analysis in Online Communication: Discussions, Monologs and Dialogs Sentiment analysis programs are now sometimes used to detect patterns of sentiment use over time in online communication and to help automated systems interact better with users. Nevertheless, it seems that no previous study has assessed whether the position of individual texts within on-going communication can be exploited to help detect their sentiments. This talk assesses apparent sentiment anomalies in on-going communication -- texts assigned significantly different sentiment strength to the average of previous texts -- to see whether their classifications can be improved. The results suggest that a damping procedure to reduce sudden large changes in sentiment can improve classification accuracy but that the optimal procedure will depend on the type of texts processed. Special event: Publication strategies, impact and careers: How can I make sure that my research gets the attention that it deserves? Please come along to this event ready to share your publication experiences and to hear about others' experiences. The objective is to think through the options that we have for publishing and disseminating research and the impact that these choices may have on our careers. For example, many people now tweet their publications: is this boasting or a useful way to ensure that your work gets noticed?

Submitting a paper constitutes a consent for publication and a promise in case of acceptance to attend the conference and to pay the fee. See more details in the legal notices.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please fill in the REGISTRATION FORM to reserve your seats for the tours, prepare your badge, etc. This is not the same as payment portal.

By submitting a paper, at least one author has thereby promised, in case of acceptance, to pay the registration fee:

The fee is per participant and per paper. I.e., for each paper, at least one fee is to be paid: if a participant presents two papers, two fees are to be paid. On the other hand, a participant that does not present any paper should pay a fee.

The early registration deadline is extended to February 15. *Authors of accepted papers should pay the fee before this deadline in order for their papers to be published. Payment instructions will be announced here when ready. For questions, please contact us at the registration@ address as indicated here. The figures in dollars are for information purposes only and can vary. Please pay in Euros.

To pay the fee, please go to the payment portal, select your type of registration fees (regular/student) and (optional) a number of extra pages in the proceedings and a number of accompanying persons in the tours of the cultural program. When you complete the payment of the fees, you will get a Registration Number; please keep it for future reference.

Why this fee?

• We do our best to keep the fee as low as possible. In particular, CICLing is run in a non-profit manner: nobody of the organizers receives any remuneration.

• CICLing gives much more than most conferences do. In particular, CICLing provides a greater number of keynote speakers, a much wider cultural program, lunches on all working days; this inevitably affects the fee. Lowering the fee beyond reasonable level would greatly decrease the quality of the conference and the benefits for its attendees, while making negligible difference for the budget of most participants, because:

  • Most universities allocate sufficient funding for attending conferences;

  • The fee is a minor part of your total expenses, as compared with the airplane tickets and lodging.

• In addition to the expenses for each participant, the fee includes a number of waivers for poor students. Namely:

  • If you pay: You pay a bit more than is spent on your participation: you also pay for students from poor countries;

  • If you don't: A waiver does not mean waiving the fee; instead, it means that others pay for you. Your waiver increases the fee for all.

• The full fee is higher than real expenses per participant, because it includes part of the student's expenses. The student fee is lower than real expenses, because non-students partially pay for the students.

• We will likely have little or no governmental funding (please let us know if you can help in any way in, or give advice about, obtaining sponsorship or another kind of help).

On reduced registration fee: A limited number of reduced fees will be available. To apply, please contact us and thoroughly justify your application. Eligible for reduced registration are people from underdeveloped countries in case if their institutions have real difficulties paying the full fee (generally not included: North America, Western Europe, China, South Korea, Japan, but if you feel your situation is really different, try applying anyway). 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 applications will be considered for already reviewed papers. Notes:

• Though all papers are judged by strictly academic criteria, in borderline cases and between papers of comparable quality we may give preference to papers with fully paid fee.

• Though we will do our best for this not to happen, we cannot guarantee providing some 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.

We are interested in a few volunteer helpers, please contact us. Speakers of the local language and residents of the local venue are preferred. The volunteers may or may not have preference in assigning fee reduction.

All papers accepted for oral presentation will be published in a proceedings volume edited by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (confirmed), which is indexed in many major indices. Papers accepted for poster presentation will be published separately in a special issue of a journal (to be announced later), see Poster Session (let us know if you actually prefer the poster type of publication).

In addition to the text of the paper, authors are strongly encouraged to provide programs that permit to reproduce their results, see CICLing verifiability, reproducibility, and working description policy.

Before submitting, please check our legal notices on video recording and on obligations of authors. In particular, 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. Submissions are received electronically:

Contact: See email options, fax, and the street address on www.CICLing.org/contact.html. Please avoid sending us any physical mail: we strongly prefer electronic communication.

Starting from 2011, CICLing implements a policy of giving preference to papers with verifiable and reproducible results, i.e., papers that provide the code and lexical resources that allow to reproduce the results. This is not a requirement. If for any reason you cannot accompany your paper with the code, go ahead and submit your paper normally.

A Special best verifiability, reproducibility, and working description award will be given at the conference.

For the time being, we encourage the submitted software to be anonymous but we do not require this: your data (but not the text of your paper) can disclose your identity if there is no reasonable way of avoiding this.

Please see our reasons and goals, a detailed description of the CICLing verifiability, reproducibility, and working description policy, and some FAQ.

The following awards will be given at the conference:

 Best Paper awards will be assigned by the Award Committee basing on the reviewers' scores and judgment of the Committee members. The criteria taken into account are: novelty, originality, and importance of the reported work and overall quality of the paper.

The papers accepted for the poster/demo session are anticipated to be published in a special issue of a journal, to be announced later. See here the guidelines for submitting and preparing your poster.

Poster session will be combined with the welcome party, so people will be in good mood when reading your poster. In our experience the authors often have better opportunity to communicate their idea to interested attendees via individual live interaction at a poster presentation than via standard talk. If you feel your paper is not competitive enough for the oral session, do go ahead and submit it: a poster can be an excellent opportunity for you to get feedback.

Immediately before the poster session the poster papers will be presented (we can call it announced) orally. Each presentation will be of one minute, and you can use a couple of slides. We recommend to use one or two slides to show the title and the main idea of your work, and the final slide to show an image of your poster, for people to recognize your poster during the poster session. The purpose of this one-minute presentation is not to explain your work in detail but to attract attention of people to you and your poster. If you succeed, you will then have two hours to explain your work to all interested people, during the poster session and in fact all the breaks on other days. Please only include the main selling points of your work in this short presentation; too dense information would only confuse people.

To streamline the session, we will ask you to send us your presentation, to be pre-loaded to our laptop. If you have your laptop at the conference, then please also have the same presentation prepared on your laptop in case if for any reason it does not run correctly on ours.

There will be four days of technical program and three days of cultural program (see our disclaimer about availability of tours).

If you don't have time for the cultural program, you can arrive on Monday and leave on Friday; you will miss some cultural activities.

Please see the accepted papers, program, poster session program.

Those going to the Ephesus tour are requested to provide their passport data via the registration form ASAP, but not later than Monday afternoon, otherwise you will not be allowed onboard by the port authorities.

For detailed information on the cultural program, see our cultural program page.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please reserve your places for the tours and give us other necessary information by filling in the REGISTRATION FORM.

See applicable conditions and disclaimers. In particular, note that part of the cultural program will require entry visa to Turkey; some activities will depend on weather conditions and can be cancelled without refund if weather is not suitable.

Please see the details on the official hotel.

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, local sightseeing, etc. All cultural activities will start from the official hotel. In addition, this hotel provided discounted rates for CICLing participants. We suggest you not to book a different hotel.

Transportation instructions is provided on the local information page. The bus to the conference will depart at 08:30 every day of talks, from the same place. Free buses to the airport:

Please see the venue info and local transportation guide. The information on that page is likely to be expanded in the future.

IMPORTANT: Cultural program: force-majeure. Some or all of the cultural program will depend on weather conditions, technical, political, or other circumstances. In particular, tours to Ephesus and Patmos will require transportation by boat, which can be impossible under unfavorable weather conditions. Decision on the possibility of transportation depends on the authorities and the captains of the boats and not on the organizers of the conference, and the corresponding tours can accordingly be cancelled at any moment without prior notice. Since all expenses such as the rent of the boats are done in advance and are non-refundable, in case of cancellation of the tours no refund can be offered to the participants. The organizers may or may not be able to provide alternative cultural or academic activities instead of cancelled tours. In addition, the tour to Ephesus will require a visa to Turkey. Obtaining such a visa (which for citizens of many countries can be obtained on site, but citizens of some countries should obtain it in advance) is a personal responsibility of each participant; issuing of such a visa depends on the Turkish authorities (and permission to return to Greece depends on the Greek authorities) and cannot be guaranteed by the organizers. In case of any visa-related problems, no refund can be offered and no specific help or alternative activity can be guaranteed.

Video recording. All CICLing-related activities, both academic and cultural, may be video recorded, photographed, and/or live video broadcast over the Internet or otherwise. The organizers may make the recordings and photos publicly available or provide them to third parties for any legal purpose, including storage and distribution. Unless otherwise explicitly communicated to the organizers in advance, by submitting a paper, registering for the conference, or attending the conference you authorize the organizers, attendees, or persons authorized by the organizers, to video record, photograph, and/or video broadcast all conference activities, including your presentation, and to make these video recordings and photos publicly available and/or available to any third party for any legal purpose, and you also promise to explicitly confirm this authorization, in writing or otherwise, if later asked to do so by the organizers. If this is a problem, please contact us in advance.

General disclaimer. No special insurance, medical service, or security measures will be provided for the conference. The participants are advised to arrange with a third party for their travel insurance that includes international medical coverage, as well as to observe the standard safety precautions. The participants will take part in all activities of the conference entirely on their own risk. The organizers shall not be liable for any illness, injuries, stolen objects, or any other problems that the participants may face during the cultural or academic program of the conference. This note does not imply any specific danger for CICLing attendees; this is a standard legal disclaimer generally applied to any conference, in any part of the world.

General Chair: Alexander Gelbukh

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

Software Reviewing Committee

    To be announced

Best Paper Award Committee

    To be announced

Please distribute the CFP! Here is a poster in different formats, please hang it on a wall in your University:

Plain text PDF A4 PDF Letter DOC A4 DOC Letter

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Contact

Comments: A.Gelbukh.

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