CICLing-2002 Third International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics February 17 to 23, 2002 Mexico City, Mexico SUMMARY PUBLICATION: Springer LNCS SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 10, short papers: November 5 INVITED SPEAKERS: (all to be confirmed): Nicoletta Calzolari, Ruslan Mitkov, Ivan Sag, Yorick Wilks, and Antonio Zampolli EXCURSIONS: Ancient pyramids, Monarch butterflies, great cave and colonial city, City Center, and more URL: http://www.cicling.org/2002 The conference is endorsed by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) +-------------------------------------------------------- | If you have Internet access, we strongly recommend you to | read this text at http://www.cicling.org/2002. One of the | reasons is that it could have been changed since this file | was published. The site has MUCH MORE INFO! +-------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS General Information Areas of Interest Poster & Demo Section Publication and Submission Guidelines Registration Important Dates Invited Speakers Hotel Info Local Transportation Guide Tentative Schedule Cultural Program Conference Committees You can see many photos of the excursions of the past CICLing-2000 and CICLing-2001 at http://www.cicling.org/2000/Photos/Frames.htm and http://www.cicling.org/2001/Photos/Frames.htm. All those photos were made by the participants of CICLing, http://www.cicling.org. +------------------------------------------------------- | GENERAL INFORMATION +------------------------------------------------------- CICLing-2002 will be held on February 17 to 23, 2002 in Mexico City, Mexico. The deadline for paper submission is October 10, 2001 (short papers: November 5). This conference is the third CICLing event. The past CICLing conferences were very successful, according to the comments of the participants. One of the messages we have received after the 2000 event was the following: "Everything was just great! Super-hyper-ultra-well done!" wrote Igor Mel'cuk, a world-recognized linguist, the author of the Meaning-Text Theory. We consider the following factors to define our identity: 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 atmosphere. It is intended for a small group of serious specialists, not more than 50 thoroughly selected participants. This allows for informal and friendly atmosphere, more resembling a party of friends than an official procedure. Of course, serious preparation stands behind this ease. Excellent excursions. Mexico is a wonderful country rich with culture, history, and nature. The conference is intended for young and active people - young in their soul, not necessarily age, - explorers in their nature, both in science and in life. Our cultural program brings the participants to unique marvels of history and nature hidden from the usual tourists. Relief of frosts. In the middle of February frosts, the participants from Europe and North America can enjoy bright warm sun under the shadow of palms. The conference is held at 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 conference is organized by the Natural Language Processing laboratory of CIC. +------------------------------------------------------- | Areas of interest +------------------------------------------------------- In general, we are interested in whatever helps, or 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 bird's-eye 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 Text generation Statistical methods in computational linguistics Corpus linguistics Dictionaries for text processing and generation Intelligent text processing and applications: Document classification and search Information retrieval Text mining and Information extraction Automatic summarization Thematic segmentation of text Spell checking Natural language interfaces In particular, papers on the following narrower themes are especially welcome: HPSG Meaning-Text theory Ambiguity resolution Subcategorization Anaphora resolution Naturally, we welcome the works on processing any language, not necessarily English, though usually 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 particular language. On the other hand, we are not interested in the topics not related to computers processing language. For example, we are not interested in the following types of submissions, which would find much more appreciative audience at some another conf or in an appropriate journal: No: Purely linguistic, dialectological, historic, etc. discussions of particular languages, without relation to their computer processing, e.g.: "Evolution of personal names in classic Latin." No: Purely computer topics not related to meaningful language processing, e.g.: "Unicode character table for Mayan glyphs," or: "Pentium-V processors with 512 MB cache make syntactic analyzers work faster." No: Application of tools traditionally developed within computational linguistics, to non-linguistic-related tasks, e.g.: "Generating of hardware test sequences with stochastic grammars." Note that applications of computer methods to purely linguistic research are not interesting for our conference, e.g., "Statistical clustering methods for the construction of historical tree of world languages". We are interested in how linguistics and computer science can help computers understand or process texts, not in how computers can help linguists investigate languages (unless the aim of such investigation would eventually help computers understand texts). If you are not sure whether your particular topic is of interest, please do not hesitate to ask (see address below). You can also have a look at the past CICLing-2001 or CICLing-2000 program to get an idea of our interests. (see www.CICLing.org/2002) +------------------------------------------------------- | Short papers. Poster & Demo section +------------------------------------------------------- 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. Whenever possible, a short paper should give references to Internet sites where more detailed info on the work can be found. The authors of some of the rejected full papers will be recommended by the Committee to re-submit their works as short papers. They will be given 5 days to convert their rejected full paper into a short paper. Short papers are also subject to reviewing process. 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 look as any normal paper looks (having the title, abstract, and references); however, we recommend that the abstract be short, and it is not necessary (though not prohibited) to divide the text into sections. In all other respects short papers must follow Springer requirements. Short papers are limited by 3 pages. Poster/demo format: Authors of the short papers will present them as posters and/or demos. They will be given approximately 2 square meters of vertical space to attach your material. If you have some special requirements, please let us know. Presentation: The Poster/Demo presentations will be organized during short breaks and after the end of the regular talks, i.e., each day from 18 to 20 pm. On the first working day of the conf, the Poster/Demo session from 18 to 20 pm will be combined with the Welcome party. Registration: There are no special rules for registration of poster presenters. The local students presenting a poster will, according to the general rule, have free access to the conf, while will not be given a copy of the Proceedings unless they pay the registration fee. All other poster presenters will have to register accordingly. Demos During the same poster/demo sessions, all participants will be able to demonstrate the material related to their talks or posters. Demo platforms provided by the organizers: PC with Windows 95/98, CD and floppy drives; no significant space on the disk is guaranteed. Those who need Windows NT on PC, Solaris on Sun, Linux on PC, Mac, etc., should contact the Committee in advance. The same about significant disk space, Internet access, or any special hardware or software requirements. Even if you do not have any special requirements, we encourage you to let us know for how much hours you will probably need a demo computer. +------------------------------------------------------- | Submission guidelines +------------------------------------------------------- Publication All accepted papers and short papers will be published in CICLing-2002 Proceedings volume edited by Springer-Verlag in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The full papers should not exceed 10 pages, though we encourage you to keep it shorter (as short as possible, but not shorter!). If you really need more pages, please let us know (see address below). Short papers should not exceed 3 pages and should, if possible, contain references to Internet sites where more detail on the work can be found. Otherwise the format of the short papers is identical to that of full papers. Format Please strictly follow the format guidelines of Springer LNSC series. We cannot guarantee publication of any paper that does not follow these guidelines. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions (see address below). Please consult our website (www.CICLing.org/2002) for more details, or write us (see address below) and we will send you that info in Word or ASCII. Submission We accept only electronic submissions. To submit a paper, send us both or any one of the following: PostScript or PDF file. PostScript usually better works with non-English characters. Source file in RTF or DOC. Or, file in LaTeX together with a PostScript or PDF files. When sending us the camera-ready paper, please send all of the following: Source file in LaTeX or RTF (not in DOC). If you use LaTeX, then also all necessary source files, such as EPS pictures and all style files different from llncs.cls (note that the use of custom style files is strongly discouraged). PostScript and PDF file, if you are unable to produce a PDF file. If you use LaTeX, then also DVI file. Copyright form by fax at +1 (520) 441-1817. If you are not sure whether some special symbols are printed correctly at our side, we encourage you to send us scanned images or fax the pages in question, clearly indicating what symbols are to be checked; e.g., you can draw a circle around the symbol we should check. Contact Email: g e l b u k h (a t) c i c l i n g (d o t) o r g www.Gelbukh.com Fax: +1 (520) 441-1817 (in the USA). Street address: (Please avoid as much as possible sending us hard copies. We cannot guarantee that we will receive them on time!) CICLing-2002, Prof. Alexander Gelbukh, Laboratorio de Lenguaje Natural, CIC - Centro de Investigacion en Computacion, IPN - Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Av. Juan Dios Batiz s/n esq. Av. M. Othon Mendizabal, Unidad Profesional "Adolfo Lopez Mateos", Col. Zacatenco, C.P. 07738, Mexico D.F. MEXICO. +------------------------------------------------------- | Registration +------------------------------------------------------- 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 their paper and to pay the corresponding early registration fee. Unless the current policy changes, the authors of accepted papers will be allowed to register on-site at the early registration rates. Note: We reserve the right to change this information before November 20; please check our website. Public: Please contact us before November 20 for early registration information. Registration fee: Before November 20: Specialists US$ 280 Students US$ 140 On site: Specialists US$ 320 Students US$ 180 Local students enter free (no printed material) A limited number of reduced registrations will be available. To apply, please contact the organizing committee (see address below) and justify your application. The reduced registration can be provided, among others, to the following categories (not in all cases!): People whose fee will not be paid by their institution and whose family income does not allow to afford paying the full fee, Those people from underdeveloped countries whose institutions have real difficulties paying the full fee (included: Latin America, Eastern Europe; not included: North America, Western Europe). +------------------------------------------------------- | Important dates +------------------------------------------------------- Full paper Submission deadline: October 10 Notification of acceptance: November 1 Camera-ready deadline: November 15 Short paper Submission deadline: November 5 Notification of acceptance: November 15 Camera-ready deadline: November 20 Conf: February 17-23 +------------------------------------------------------- | Invited speakers +------------------------------------------------------- As to date, all information about invited speakers is preliminary; please return to the web page later. We also plan to post there abstracts of their talks. Nicoletta Calzolari (Institute for Computational Linguistics, Pisa, Italy). A talk on linguistic resources. Ruslan Mitkov (U. of Wolverhampton, UK). A talk on anaphora resolution. Ivan Sag (Stanford U., USA) A talk on HPSG grammar formalism. Yorick Wilks (Sheffield U., UK) A talk on dictionaries. Antonio Zampolli (Institute for Computational Linguistics, Pisa, Italy). A talk on linguistic resources. +------------------------------------------------------- | Hotel info +------------------------------------------------------- We suggest that it is convenient for the participants to stay in the same hotel, to facilitate informal communication. Also, we expect to provide free transportation from the recommended hotel to the conf place. The hotel **** El Ejecutivo is affordable, nice, and located in the central district. Address: Av. Viena # 8, Colonia Juarez, Mexico DF, 06600. Tel. +52 (5) 566-6422, 566-6565, fax for reservations +52 (5) 535-5088. At the web site you also can see a booklet with some info and a local map. Rates (approximately): Single: US$40 per night, Double: $50 (shared $25/person) per night. Triple: $60 (shared $20/person) per night. You do not need to reserve your room; we will do it for you. Please see the website for more info or send us a message. +------------------------------------------------------- | Local transportation guide and useful info +------------------------------------------------------- Please see the website (www.CICLing.org/2002). +------------------------------------------------------- | Tentative schedule +------------------------------------------------------- The following schedule and, in particular, the list of excursions and their exact dates are tentative. There will be four working days and three days of excursions (so you can arrive on Monday and leave on Friday if you wish.) February 17, Sunday: Excursion to Teotihuacan: ancient Indian pyramids. February 18, Monday: Registration. Talks. Welcome party. February 19, Tuesday: Talks. February 20, Wednesday: Excursion to Angangueo: Monarch Butterfly wintering site and/or to the City Center. February 21, Thursday: Talks and workshops. February 22, Friday: Talks and workshops. Excursion to the Anthropological Museum. February 23, Saturday: Excursion to Cacahuamilpa and Taxco: great cave and colonial city. +------------------------------------------------------- | Cultural Program +------------------------------------------------------- Excursions One of the most exciting things at the conference are excursions 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 common opinion of the last year's participants, the excursions were excellent; you can see their own photos at our website. Warning: the excursion to the Butterflies is very long and tiresome, especially for not so young people. We think it is worth the trouble, but you decide. We will try to arrange for an alternative excursion to the city center at the same time as the excursion to the Butterflies. Here is the tentative list of excursions: Excursion to the Anthropological Museum (Mexico City) Excursion to the City Center: (Mexico City) Excursion to Teotihuacan: ancient Indian pyramids, 1 hour drive Excursion to Cacahuamilpa and Taxco: great cave and colonial city, 2 hours drive Excursion to Angangueo: Monarch Butterfly wintering site, 4 hours drive Note for former CICLing participants: We do understand that repeating the same excursions is a bad idea. On the other hand, these are the best of the best ones, and significantly changing the list would not be fair to the new participants. If you have any specific idea what you would like to visit, please let me know and we will try to arrange for this. We are open to any ideas on what excursions would be interested. Please write your ideas to Alexander Gelbukh (see address below). Welcome party The reception party will be combined with the opening of the Poster and Demo section. We will have some snack, maybe some wine. No music, no serious food, even no tables, sorry. 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). +------------------------------------------------------- | Conference Committees +------------------------------------------------------- This year, the conference features a very strong international Program Committee. Please read the list: if you are seriously involved in computational linguistics, you will be surprised how many of the names you will find very familiar. Program Committee 1. Barbu, Catalina, UK 2. Blekhman, Michael, Canada 3. Boitet, Christian, France 4. Bolshakov, Igor, Mexico 5. Kalina Bontcheva, UK 6. Brusilovsky, Peter, USA 7. Calzolari, Nicoletta, Italy 8. Carroll, John, UK 9. Cassidy, Patrick, USA 10. Cristea, Dan, Romania 11. Gelbukh, Alexander (chair), Mexico 12. Hasida, Koiti, Japan 13. Harada, Yasunari, Japan 14. Hirst, Graeme, Canada 15. Johnson, Frances, UK 16. Kittredge, Richard, USA / Canada 17. Kharrat, Alma, USA 18. Knudsen, Line, Denmark 19. Koch, Gregers, Denmark 20. Kuebler, Sandra, Germany 21. Lappin, Shalom, UK 22. Laufer, Natalia, Russia 23. Lopez-Lopez, Aurelio, Mexico 24. Loukanova, Roussanka, USA / Bulgaria 25. Luedeling, Anke, Germany 26. Maegard, Bente, Denmark 27. Martin-Vide, Carlos, Spain 28. Mel'cuk, Igor, Canada 29. Metais, Elisabeth, France 30. Mikheev, Andrei, UK 31. Mitkov, Ruslan, UK 32. Murata, Masaki, Japan 33. Narin'yani, Alexander, Russia 34. Nevzorova, Olga, Russia 35. Nirenburg, Sergei, USA 36. Palomar, Manuel, USA / Spain 37. Pedersen, Ted, USA 38. Pineda-Cortes, Luis Alberto, Mexico 39. Piperidis, Stelios, Greece 40. Ren, Fuji, Japan 41. Sag, Ivan, USA 42. Sidorov, Grigori, Mexico 43. Sharoff, Serge, Russia 44. Sun Maosong, China 45. Tait, John, UK 46. Trujillo, Arturo, UK 47. T'sou Ka-yin, Benjamin, Hong Kong 48. Verspoor, Karin, USA / The Netherlands 49. Vilares Ferro, Manuel, Spain 50. Wilks, Yorick, UK Organizing committee 1. Alexander Gelbukh (chair) 2. Carlos Vizcaino Sahagun 3. Carlos Ulloa 4. Soila Vargas Garcia 5. Teresa Salcedo Camarena More info: g e l b u k h (a t) c i c l i n g (d o t) o r g www.Gelbukh.com