ICON-2009: 7th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Hyderabad, India

14- 17 December 2009

Organized by
NLP Association, India
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The seventh International Conference on Natural Language Processing(ICON 2009)
will be held at University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India during 14-17
December, 2009. The ICON conference series is a forum for promoting interaction
among researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing in India and
abroad. This year ICON-2009 will be co-located with 31st All India Conference
of Linguistics (AICL31)

1. TOPICS:
Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research
on all aspects of Natural Language Processing, with a particular focus on
languages, issues, and applications relevant to India. The areas of interest
include, but are not limited to:

Morphology Parsing
Phonology Word Sense Disambiguation
Syntax Machine Translation
Semantics Information Retrieval
Discourse Text Summarization
Pragmatics Question Answering
Statistical methods Dialog Systems
Knowledge-based methods Performance Evaluation
Annotated Corpora Speech Corpora
Lexical Resources Speech Recognition
Ontology Speech Synthesis
POS tagging

1.1 SPECIAL TRACK:
ICON-2009 will also have a separate track on Linguistic models in NLP. Purely
theoretical papers in linguistics which have implications for computational
linguistics are also invited under this track.

2. FORMAT OF SUBMISSION:
Papers in English, not exceeding 10 pages, should be submitted at
www.iiit.ac.in/icon2009. One can also submit hard copy (four copies) under
special circumstances. Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200
words. Papers outside the specified length are subject to rejection without
review. Please see the style file at
www.aclweb.org/downloads/acl-ftp/Styfiles/Proceedings/

BLIND REVIEW:
Kindly ensure that authors' names and affiliations are given only on a separate
cover sheet. Papers in electronic form can be in plain text, Postscript, PDF,
Latex or Microsoft Word (RTF only). If your paper contains text of languages
other than English, please attach relevant font files along with your
submission.

3. CALL FOR TUTORIALS/WORKSHOPS:
Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials. Tutorials/Workshops can be
of half-day or full-day duration. The proposal should be presented in the form
of a 200-word abstract, one page topical outline of the content, description of
the proposers and their qualifications relating to the tutorial content.

Send tutorial/Workshop proposals to the ICON-2009 Secretariat. For further
information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2009
Secretariat.

4. NLP TOOLS CONTEST: Parsing
Efficient Indian language (IL) parsing still remains an open problem. One
reason for this is the unavailability of annotated corpora to experiment.
This contest aims to bring together researchers working/interested in the
area of IL parsing to explore techniques that can improve the present
accuracies, by providing sufficient annotated data. This contest, however,
will only focus on dependency parsing.

CONTEST:
Participants will be provided training, development and testing data to report
the efficiency of their dependency parsers. Languages such as Hindi, Bangla,
Oriya, Marathi, etc. will be explored. Parser efficiency will be measured in
terms of standard measures such as Unlabelled attachment accuracy and Labelled
attachment accuracy. Shortlisted candidates will present their techniques and
results work in a special session at ICON. Note that it is not necessary that
the participating parser be a statistical one, other types such as grammar
driven parsers or hybrid parsers can also participate.

The Contest will have two prizes :
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.7500/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.5000/-

Resources: To be Announced

5. STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES:
ICON-2009 announces STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION in two tracks: Track I : NLP (All
areas) Track II : Linguistics (Morphology, Syntax and Semantics)

Papers may be submitted under the link on the web page. Prizes will be awarded
in each track for up to two papers based on original work carried out. The
prizes are::

FIRST PRIZE: Rs.7500/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.5000/-

The short-listed papers in each track will be invited for presentation in a
special session in ICON-2009 conference. Registration, domestic travel and
subsistence expenses will be provided by the conference organizers for one
author of each paper. Up to two winners will be offered summer fellowships at
major NLP Centres in India. For any clarifications, contact Student Paper
Competition Chair on icon09student@....

6. IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper registration deadline Aug 1, 2009
Paper submission deadline Aug 1, 2009
Paper acceptance notification Sep 15, 2009
Camera ready copy due Oct 20, 2009

Tutorial/Workshop proposals due Aug 7, 2009
Tutorial acceptance notification Aug 16, 2009
Lecture Materials for tutorial Nov 15, 2009

NLP Tools Contest registration
deadline Jul 21, 2009
Student Paper Competition
submission deadline Aug 7, 2009

7. COMMITTEES:

ADVISORY COMMITTEE CHAIR
Aravind K Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA

CONFERENCE GENERAL CHAIR
Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE CHAIR
Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad
Vasudeva Varma, IIIT, Hyderabad

TOOLS CONTEST CHAIR
Samar Husain, IIIT, Hyderabad

STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION CHAIR
Sudeshna Sarkar, IIT, Kharagpur

ORGANIZING CHAIR
R K Bagga, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
Ashish Jacob Thomas, University of Hyderabad

8. CONTACT INFORMATION
ICON-2009 Secretariat
Language Technologies Research Centre
International Institute of Information Technology
Gachibowli, Hyderabad - 500 032, India
Ph: +91-40-2300 1412; Fax: +91-40-6653 1413
e-mail: icon2009@...
www.iiit.ac.in/icon2009