1st International Conference on Arabic Computational Linguistics
April 17–20, 2015 • Cairo, Egypt
Co-located with CICLing 2015, 16th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Arabic Computational Linguistics
Cultural program: three full-day tours to
Giza Pyramids, Fayoum oasis.
Pre/post conf tours to Aswan, Luxor, etc., for separate
fee.
Keynote: Erik Cambria, Mona Diab,
Kais Haddar, Joakim
Nivre
Erik Cambria Nanyang Tech. U |
Mona
Diab George Washington U. |
Kais Haddar U. of Sfax |
Joakim Nivre Uppsala U. |
Organization
ACLing 2015 is hosted by Nile University, Egypt, and organized by the CICLing 2015 Organizing Committee in conjunction with the Nile University, the Natural Language and Text Processing Laboratory of the CIC, IPN, and the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA).
Publication
Proceedings of the conference will be submitted for possible publication by the Conference Publishing Services (CPS). In case of acceptance, the content will be submitted to Xplore and CSDL. Content will be also submitted to the indexing companies for possible indexing; note, however, that indexing services are independent organizations, and we cannot guarantee that any particular abstract or index entry will be included in EI Compendex or any other indexing service.
In general, we are interested in whatever helps, will help eventually, or might help computers meaningfully deal with Arabic 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 and speech 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:
Arabic Computational linguistics research: |
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Intelligent text and speech processing and their applications for Arabic language: |
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When discussing phenomena of Arabic language, please keep your discussion understandable for people not familiar with this language.
Erik Cambria,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Keynote talk (tentative): Sentic Patterns: Designing the Circuitry of Sentiment Data Flow Abstract: The Web is evolving through an era where the opinions of users are getting increasingly important and valuable. The distillation of knowledge from the huge amount of unstructured information on the Web can be a key factor for tasks such as social media marketing, branding, product positioning, and corporate reputation management. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far. To this end, concept-level sentiment analysis aims to go beyond a mere word-level analysis of text and provide novel approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis that enable a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data. A recent knowledge-based technology in this context is sentic computing, which relies on the ensemble application of common-sense computing and the psychology of emotions to infer the conceptual and affective information associated with natural language. Sentic computing, however, is limited by the richness of the knowledge base and by the fact that the bag-of-concepts model, despite more sophisticated than bag-of-words, misses out important discourse structure information that is key for properly detecting the polarity conveyed by natural language opinions. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm to concept-level sentiment analysis that merges linguistics, common-sense computing, and machine learning for improving the accuracy of tasks such as polarity detection. By allowing sentiments to flow from concept to concept based on the dependency relation of the input sentence like in an electronic circuit, in particular, we achieve a better understanding of the contextual role of each concept within the sentence and, hence, obtain a polarity detection engine that outperforms state-of-the-art statistical methods. Another talk or special event (tentative): Sentic DB (see info on Sentic Computing). |
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Mona
Diab, George Washington University, US
Keynote: Towards the Computational Modeling of Linguistic
Sociopragmatics Bio: Mona Diab is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the George Washington University. She is also a cofounder of the CADIM (Columbia Arabic Dialect Modeling) group at Columbia University. She is the Director of the CARE4Lang NLP lab at GWU. Mona earned her PhD in Computational Linguistics from University of Maryland College Park with Philip Resnik in 2003 and then did her postdoctoral training with Daniel Jurafsky at Stanford University where she was part of the NLP group. From 2005 till 2012, before joining GWU in Jan of 2013, Mona held the position of Research Scientist/Principle Investigator at Columbia University, Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS). Mona's research interests span computational lexical semantics, multilingual processing (with a special interest in Arabic and low resource languages), unsupervised learning for NLP, computational sociopragmatic modeling, information extraction and machine translation. Over the past 12 years, Mona has developed significant expertise in modeling low resource languages with a focus on Arabic dialect processing. She is especially interested in ways to leverage existing rich resources to inform algorithms for processing low resource languages. Her research has been published in over 120 papers in various internationally recognized scientific venues. Mona serves as the current elected President of both the ACL SIG on Semitic Language Processing and the ACL SIG on issues in the Lexicon (SIGLEX). Mona recently (2012) co-founded the yearly *SEM conference that attempts to bring together all aspects of semantic processing under the same umbrella. Special event: Lost and found in Idiomatic Translation |
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Kais Haddar,
University of Sfax, Tunisia Bio: Kais Haddar is a professor at the University of Sfax, Tunisia. He has been recently a co-author of a number of relevant publications on Arabic Computational Linguistics, such as: HPSG Grammar for Arabic Coordination Experimented with LKB System, FLAIRS Conference; Building an Arabic Linguistic Resource from a Treebank: The Case of Property Grammar, TSD 2014; A prototype for projecting HPSG syntactic lexica towards LMF, JLCL 27(1); A prototype for projecting HPSG syntactic lexica towards LMF, CoRR 2012; Application of classical compilation techniques for syntactic and semantic analysis of specification written in Object Z, CoRR 2012; Recognition and Translation of Arabic Named Entities with NooJ Using a New Representation Model, FSMNLP 2011; A New Representation Model for the Automatic Recognition and Translation of Arabic Named Entities with NooJ, RANLP 2011; Construction of an HPSG Grammar for the Arabic Relative Sentences, RANLP 2011; Analyses Tools for Non-head Structures, RANLP 2011; A Syntactic Lexicon for Arabic Verbs, LREC 2010; An Ellipsis Resolution System for the Arabic Language. Int. J. Comput. Proc. Oriental Lang. 22(4); LMF Standardized Model for the Editorial Electronic Dictionaries of Arabic, NLPCS 2008. |
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Joakim Nivre, Uppsala
University, Sweden Keynote talk: Towards a Universal Grammar for Natural Language Processing Abstract: Universal Dependencies is a recent initiative to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. In this talk, I outline the motivation behind the initiative and explain how the basic design principles follow from these requirements. I then discuss the different components of the annotation standard, including principles for word segmentation, morphological annotation, and syntactic annotation. I conclude with some thoughts on the challenges that lie ahead. Special event: to be announced. |
Expression of interest = registration of abstracts, see below |
passed (January 25, 2015) |
Full text of registered papers (please first register your abstract) |
passed (February 1, 2015) |
Notification of acceptance |
passed (February 24) |
Camera-ready deadline (post-conference) |
to be announced |
Early registration (authors) |
passed (March 25) |
Conference |
April 17–20, 2015 |
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.
Paper submission is divided into two phases:
Please express your interest now by registering a tentative abstract of the paper via the web submission system. At this stage, the full text is not required and the tentative abstract will only be used to assign reviewers for your paper. You can update abstract, title, or full text as many times as you wish while the paper submission system is open. At this stage we only need to know the topic of your paper
By the full text deadline, the authors of papers registered at the previous step should upload the full text of the paper. No changes should be made after this date (but contact the organizers if you need to make changes).
Early registration deadline is March 25. Registration and payment is open. Early registration:
$ 675 USD full fee / professional, 0 or 1 papers
$ 450 USD student fee, 0 or 1 papers
$ 600 USD for each additional paper for professionals
$ 400 USD for each additional paper for students
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. For questions, please contact us at the registration@ address as indicated here. By submitting a paper, at least one author has thereby promised, in case of acceptance, to pay the registration fee.
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.
In addition to the text of the paper, authors are strongly encouraged to provide code and data that permit to reproduce their results, see our 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 (if possible) and to pay the corresponding registration fee. Submissions are received electronically:
Contact: See our contact options.
We implement 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.If your data are too large to be attached within the EasyChair program, then please:
Please try to make your software self-contained by reasonably including whatever is needed to run it (such as specific versions of programs). Specifically, please avoid pointing to URLs where the data can be downloaded from; instead, please include the actual data whenever possible -- this is important for reproducibility because the data on remote servers might change (or become unavailable) at any moment, while attached data will be safely stored on our servers. All programs should be submitted in source code, and all data in clearly specified, preferably human-readable, format.
Please see a detailed description of the our verifiability, reproducibility, and working description policy, our reasons and goals, and some FAQ. Note that by submitting your material you allow its free distribution in case of acceptance of your paper; see more details in legal disclaimers.
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 (better to say, 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 maybe the main results, 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.
There will be four days of technical program and three days of academic activities and cultural program (see our disclaimer about availability of tours). Here is a tentative general layout (please check this page in some days for possible changes):
Friday 17: |
Academic and cultural activities |
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Saturday 18: |
Keynote talks, regular talks, special event, short presentations + poster session + welcome party |
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Sunday 19: |
Keynote talks, regular talks, special event, awarding and closing ceremony |
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Monday 20: |
Academic and cultural activities |
See detailed schedule.
Accepted papers in the camera-ready version should be formatted according to the CPS guidelines.
See detailed schedule of presentations of the accepted papers.
Detailed schedule of the tours is available.
Pre-conference tours: Aswan, Luxor; post-conf Nile Cruise. Arrive several days earlier or leave same days later, and see a lot more of Egypt in company of fellow computational linguists, participants of the conference. This is an excellent opportunity of makes friends and contacts for future collaboration and study. Note: these tours are for a separate fee. Limited number of places; please contact them ASAP (preferably by March 26) to book or express interest.
Alternatively, you may decide to travel on your own (pre- or post-conf), or you may know a better way to organize a tour. Please contact us and I will put you in contact with others who look for such a trip. It's always better to travel in company.
During the conference, we will have two full-day tours: on Friday 17 and Tuesday 20. We expect to visit main tourist attractions in Cairo: the Giza pyramids and Fayoum oasis. See more information on our cultural activities. See applicable conditions and disclaimers.
Information about conference hotels and booking. Official hotels: Novotel Cairo 6th of October, Swiss Inn Plaza Hotel, Cairo Plaza Guest House.
Transportation to/from the conference venue and tours will be provided (only) from these hotels.
To get the discounted rates, please book only though the provided page.
It is convenient for the participants to stay in the same hotel or nearby hotels, 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 the participants. We suggest you not to book a different hotel.
The conference venue is: Nile University, Egypt; address: Smart Village, Km 28, Cairo/Alexandria Desert Road, Giza, Egypt. Venue contacts: Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, Center for Informatics Science, Nile University, Smart Village, Km 28, Cairo/Alexandria Desert Road, Giza, Egypt; Alexander Gelbukh, Centro de Investigacion en Computacion, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Av. Juan Dios Batiz s/n casi esq. Av. Mendizabal, Col. Nueva Industrial Vallejo, C.P. 07738, Mexico DF, Mexico; phone: +52 55 5729-6000 ext. 56544; mobile: +52 1 55-1810-4587.
Please see local information.
By submitting a paper or attending the conference you accept the following terms:
Obligations of the authors. Submitting a paper constitutes a consent for publication, acceptance of the terms specified hereby, and a promise in case of acceptance to provide a correct and complete camera-ready version of the paper in editable (source) format, a duly filled copyright transfer form, to attend the conference (if possible), and to pay the registration fee, except in the cases agreed upon in due time with the organizers.
Software and data. Software and data accompanying the paper will be treated in the same way as the paper itself in that in case of acceptance, free access to this material can be provided to the readers of the paper or to public. By submitting software or data, you agree that in case of acceptance, it can be freely distributed by the organizers, and anybody is allowed to copy it. This also applies to the cases when you provide only a URL: you agree that the organizers can store a copy of the data accessible via this URL and, in case of acceptance, freely distribute this copy. While you cannot restrict copying of the submitted data (otherwise don't submit it), you can restrict using your data by including a reasonable no-nonsense license, which should allow the use of the data for research purposes.
Cultural program. The cultural program is a courtesy of the organizing committee provided "as is" and intended to help the participants in visiting certain places, which they visit under their own risk and responsibility. Quality and safety. Some or all of the cultural program activities may be organized not professionally but by volunteers. We will make any reasonable effort in order for the activities to be interesting, well-organized, and safe, but we cannot guarantee any particular quality of service. Some activities may require physical effort, such as much walking or hill-climbing, and/or rely on the use of public transportation.
Force-majeure. Though so far no tours have been cancelled due to force-majeure circumstances at any of our past conferences, the following formal disclaimer applies: Some or all of the cultural program may depend on weather conditions, technical, political, or other circumstances. Permission for transportation or visiting specific places may depend on the authorities and not on the organizing committee; thus the corresponding tours can accordingly be cancelled at any moment without prior notice. Since all expenses 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.Video recording. All activities related to the conference, 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. The following text does not imply any specific risk for the attendees; this is a standard legal disclaimer generally applied to any public event in any part of the world: No special insurance, medical service, or security measures are guaranteed to 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, to the extend permitted by law, for any illness, injuries, stolen objects, or any other problems that the participants may face during the cultural or academic program of the conference.
General Chairs: Alexander Gelbukh, Khaled Shaalan
Program Chairs: Alexander Gelbukh, Samhaa El-Beltagy
Organizing Committee
Samhaa El-Beltagy | Co-chair | Nile University | |||
Khaled Shaalan | Co-chair | The British University in Dubai, UAE | |||
Hussein Anis | Senior Adviser | Nile University | |||
Aleya Serag El-Din | Principal co-coordinator | Nile University | |||
Yasser Nasr | Finance | Nile University | |||
Sameh Habib | Facilities and Logistics | Nile University | |||
Hoda El-Beleidy | Accommodation | Nile University | |||
Mariam Yasin Abdel Ghafar | Cultural activities | The Human Foundation | |||
Yasser Bayoumi | Engineering | Nile University | |||
Mahmoud Gabr | IT | Nile University | |||
Layla Al Roz | Nile University | ||||
Hady Alsahar | Nile University | ||||
Mohamed Fawzy | Nile University | ||||
Amal Halby | Nile University | ||||
Muhammad Hammad | Nile University | ||||
Talaat Khalil | Nile University | ||||
Yomna El-Nahas | Nile University | ||||
Omnia Zayed | Nile University |
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Program Committee of CICLing 2015
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