NLPCC 2017 Final Call for Papers

The conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) is the annual meeting of the CCF TCCI (Technical Committee of Chinese Information, China Computer Federation). NLPCC is a leading international conference specialized in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Chinese Computing (CC). It serves as a main forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences, and to promote their research and technical innovations in the fields. Previous NLPCC conferences were successfully held in Beijing (2012), Chongqing (2013), Shenzhen (2014), Nanchang (2015), and Kunming (2016).

Today, NLP and CC technologies are among the most active research and development areas due to rapid advancement of the Internet as well as the worldwide proliferation of mobile devices and social media. The fields are facing many new challenges arising from intelligent applications and big data, such as business intelligence, social analytics, etc. The Sixth Conference of NLPCC will focus on Natural Language Analysis and Understanding in Big Data including Fundamental Research in Language Computing, Multilingual Access, Web Mining/Text Mining, Machine Learning for NLP, Knowledge Graph, Information Extraction, Question Answering, Information Retrieval, Chatbot, NLP for Social Networks, as well as the Applications of Language Computing.

Noticeably, NLPCC 2017 keynote speakers include Jianfeng Gao (Microsoft AI and Research, USA), Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh, UK), Noah Smith (University of Washington, USA) and Hua Wu (Baidu, China). And NLPCC Tutorials/ADL will be delivered by Jianfeng Gao, Mirella Lapata, Xing Xie (Microsoft Research Asia, China), Rui Yan (Peking University, China), et al.

NLPCC 2017 welcomes original technical papers on new concepts, innovative research, systems, standards, testing & evaluation, applications, and industrial case studies related to NLP & CC. Authors are invited to submit complete and unpublished papers in English or in Chinese. Papers currently under review in other conferences or journals are acceptable; yet commitment to the conference must be made upon acceptance.

Relevant topics of NLPCC 2017 include, but are not limited to, the following:

◇ Fundamentals of Language Computing

◇ Word Segmentation & Named Entity Recognition

◇ Syntactic Parsing, Semantic Analysis, Discourse Analysis

◇ NLP for Minority and Low-resource Languages

◇ Applications of Natural Language Processing

◇ Digital Publishing, Document Engineering, OCR & Fonts Computing

◇ NLP for Mobile Computing

◇ Machine Translation & Multilingual Information Access

◇ Machine Learning for NLP

◇ Web/Text Mining & Big Data

◇ Information Retrieval & Extraction

◇ Knowledge Representation & Acquisition

◇ Personalization & Recommendation

◇ Semantic Web & Knowledge Base

◇ NLP for Search & Ads

◇ Query & Document Understanding

◇ Topic Detection & Tracking

◇ Sentiment analysis & Opinion Mining

◇ Question Answering, Chatbot & User Interaction

◇ Social Computing

◇ Rumor Detection

Submission Guidelines

The proceedings of the conference will be published as a volume in the Springer LNAI series (EI & ISTP indexed, for English papers), and the ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis (Scopus indexed, for Chinese papers), respectively. English submissions should follow the LNCS formatting instructions, without exceeding twelve (12) pages. The submissions must therefore be formatted in accordance with the standard Springer style sheets ([LaTeX][Microsoft Word]). Submissions in Chinese should follow the formatting instructions of the ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis [Format Template], without exceeding eight (8) pages in A4 (210 × 297 mm) size.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the submission website. Email submissions will not be accepted. English papers should be submitted to the Main Track (https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2017/Main-English), and Chinese papers should be submitted to the Chinese Track (https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2017/Main-Chinese). Authors of Chinese submissions are required to provide Chinese titles in the submission system. All student first authors are encouraged to contact nlpcc@pku.edu.cn, indicating their names, affiliations, and the titles of their submissions.

High quality research papers in English will be selected for significant revision and recommended to the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP). The revised papers will be published at the journal after successfully going through the normal review process of the journal.

All submissions should be in PDF format.

Double-Blind Reviewing

Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing:

Every research paper submitted to NLPCC 2017 will undergo a "double-blind" reviewing process: the PC members and referees who review the paper will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure anonymity of authorship, authors must prepare their manuscript as follows:

1. Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.

2. Funding sources must not be acknowledged on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.

3. Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.

4. The paper's file name must not identify the authors of the paper. It is strongly suggested that the submitted file be named with the assigned submission number.

5. You must also use care when referring to related previous work, particularly your own work, in the paper. For example, if you are Jane Smith, the following text gives away the authorship of the submitted paper:

In our previous work [1,2], we presented two algorithms for ... In this paper, we build on that work by ...

Bibliography

[1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACL 2007, pp. 1-8.

[2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACL 2008, pp.33-40.

The solution is to reference your past work in the third person (just as you would any other piece of work that is related to the submitted paper). This allows you to set the context for the submitted paper, while at the same time preserving anonymity:

In previous work [1,2], algorithms were presented for ... In this paper, we build on that work by ...

Bibliography

[1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACL 2007, pp. 1-8.

[2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACL 2008, pp.33-40.

It is the responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity. Papers that do not follow the guidelines here, or otherwise potentially reveal the identity of the authors, are subject to rejection without review.

Submission details are provided on the conference website: http://tcci.ccf.org.cn/conference/2017.

For more information about paper submission, contact Xuanjing HUANG, program co-chair (xjhuang@fudan.edu.cn).

Events

In addition to technical contributions, NLPCC 2017 invites proposals for workshops, panels, technical evaluations and industry presentations. For workshops, NLPCC 2017 will provide administrative support for workshop room booking, registration and publication. All papers accepted by NLPCC 2017 workshops will be published in a combined volume of the NLPCC 2017 Proceedings.

Proposals or industry papers should be sent as e-mail attachments to zhaody@pku.edu.cn before October 10, 2017.

Important dates

◇ Paper Submission Deadlines:

• June 5, 2017 (Chinese Track, 23:59, Beijing Time), https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2017/Main-Chinese/

• July 9, 2017 (Main Track, 23:59, Beijing Time), https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2017/Main-English/

◇ Notification: August 20, 2017

◇ Camera ready: September 5, 2017

◇ Tutorials / CCF Advanced Disciplines Lectures (ADL): November 8-10, 2017

◇ Main Conference: November 11-12, 2017

It is important to note that, since extra time is required to review Chinese papers by the ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis, the paper submission deadline is about one month earlier for Chinese papers.

Awards and Grants

◇ Best Paper Awards and Best Student Awards

A sub-committee will be appointed by the Program Committee Co-Chairs to select best papers in a two-round double-blinded review process for the awards, sponsored by Microsoft Research Asia.

◇ Travel Grants

Grants are available for the first author of any accepted long paper. Preference will be given to applicants employed or studying in the western or middle regions of China and oversea students.

In addition, first authors of published papers in (or accepted by) leading international conferences or journals within the last 12 months of the conference date (November 12, 2017) can apply for free registration of NLPCC 2017.

◇ Expo and Industrial Demo Grants

All participants who will attend the Industrial Expo of NLPCC 2017 can apply for the Expo Grants. The grants will provide free booth and exhibition registration to selected participants who demonstrates outstanding novel technology or product.

Contacts: nlpcc@pku.edu.cn or zhaody@pku.edu.cn.

Organization

◇ Organizer:

o China Compute Federation (CCF)

◇ Supported by:

o Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP)

◇ Hosts:

o Dalian University of Technology

o National State Key Laboratory of Digital Publishing, Founder Group, China

◇ General chairs:

o Tiejun ZHAO, Harbin Institute of Technology

o Hans USZKOREIT, Saarland University