The CCF International 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). NLPCC is recognized by CCF as a category C conference recently.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), Kunming (2016), Dalian (2017), Hohhot (2018), , and Dunhuang (2019).

Today, NLP and CC technologies are among the most active research and development areas due to the 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.

NLPCC 2020 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 Authors are invited to submit complete and unpublished papers in English or Chinese in the following categories:

◇ Applications/tools

◇ Empirical/data-driven approaches

◇ Resources and evaluation

◇ Theoretical

◇ Survey papers

Papers currently under review in other conferences or journals are acceptable; however, commitment to the conference must be made upon acceptance.

Relevant topics of NLPCC 2020 include, but are not limited to, the following:

◇ Computational Social Science and Social Media

◇ Dialogue and Interactive Systems

◇ Discourse and Pragmatics

◇ Ethics and Privacy

◇ Information Extraction

◇ Information Retrieval and Text Mining

◇ Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

◇ Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

◇ Machine Learning for NLP

◇ Machine Translation and Multilinguality

◇ Multimodal Language Processing

◇ NLP Applications

◇ NLP for Minority and Low-resource Languages

◇ Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

◇ Question Answering

◇ Resources and Evaluation

◇ Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other areas

◇ Semantic Web, Knowledge Base, and Knowledge Graph

◇ Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

◇ Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding

◇ Summarization and Generation

◇ Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

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 (EI & Scopus indexed, for Chinese papers), respectively.English submissions should follow the LNCS formatting instructions. The maximum paper length is 12 pages, including references; 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 (including references) 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/nlpcc/Main-English-2020), and Chinese papers should be submitted to the Chinese Track (https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-Chinese-2020). Authors of Chinese submissions are required to provide Chinese titles in the submission system.

All submissions should be in PDF format.

Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing:

Every research paper submitted to NLPCC 2020 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.

Several workshops will be held in conjunction with NLPCC, including student workshop, evaluation workshop, and technical workshops. The Call for Papers for the workshops have been published on the conference website.

All papers accepted by NLPCC 2020 workshops will be published in a combined volume of the NLPCC 2020 Proceedings.

◇ Paper Submission Deadlines: June 7, 2020 (extended)

● Main Track: https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-English-2020

● Chinese Track: https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-Chinese-2020

◇ Notification: July 30, 2020

◇ Camera-ready Deadline: August 15, 2020

◇ Tutorials: October 14-16, 2020

◇ Main Conference: October 17-18, 2020

All deadlines are 23:59 PM, Beijing.

◇ Best Paper Awards and Best Student Paper Awards

Award committee will be appointed by the Program Committee Co-Chairs to select best papers in a separated round of review. The best paper awards and best student awards are sponsored by Microsoft Research.

◇ Travel Grants

Grants are available for students with first-author accepted long papers. Preference will be given to applicants employed or studying in the western or middle regions of China and overseas 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 (October 17, 2020) can apply for free registration of NLPCC 2020.

◇ Organizer:

● China Computer Federation (CCF)

◇ Hosts:

● Zhengzhou University

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

◇ Publishers:

● Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), Springer Verlag

● ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis

◇ General Chairs:

● Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh

● Xuanjing Huang, Fudan University

◇ PC Chairs:

● Xiaodan Zhu, Queen's University

● Min Zhang, Tsinghua University

◇ Student Workshop Chairs:

● Jin-Ge Yao, Microsoft Research Asia

● Xin Zhao, Renmin University of China

◇ Evaluation Chairs:

● Shoushan Li, Soochow University

● Yunbo Cao, Tencent

◇ Technical Workshop Chair:

● Xiaodong He, JD.COM

● Feiyu Xu, SAP

◇ Tutorial Chairs:

● Xipeng Qiu, Fudan University

● Rui Xia, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

◇ Publication Chairs:

● Yu Hong, Soochow University

● Ruifang He, Tianjin University

◇ Journal Coordinator:

● Yunfang Wu, Peking University

◇ Conference Handbook Chair:

● Yuxiang Jia, Zhengzhou University

◇ Sponsorship Chairs:

● Dongyan Zhao, Peking University

● Derek Wong, University of Macau

◇ Publicity Chairs:

● Wei Lu, Singapore University of Technology and Design

● Haofen Wang, Tongji University

◇ Organization Chairs:

● Hongying Zan, Zhengzhou University

● Xiaojun Wan, Peking University

● Zhumin Chen, Shandong University

◇ Area Chairs:

      Conversational Bot/QA:

● Yu Su, Ohio State University

● Quan liu, iFlytek

      Fundamentals of NLP:

● Lili Mou, University of Alberta

● Jiajun Zhang, Institute of automation, CAS

      Knowledge Graph and Semantic Web:

● Xiang Ren, University of Southern California

● Min Liu, Harbin Institute of Technology

      Machine Learning for NLP:

● Mo Yu, IBM T.J Watson Research Center

● Jiwei Li, Shannon.AI

      Machine Translation and Multilinguality:

● Jiatao Gu, Facebook AI

● Jinsong Su, Xiamen University

      NLP Applications:

● Wei Gao, Singapore Management University

● Xiangnan He, University of Science and Technology of China

      Text Mining:

● Wei Lu, Singapore University of Technology and Design

● Qi Zhang, Fudan University

      Social Network:

● Xiangliang Zhang, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

● Huaping Zhang, Beijing Institute of Technology

      Trending Topics (Explainability, Ethics, Privacy, Multimodal NLP):

● Caiming Xiong, Salesforce

● Zhiyuan Liu, Tsinghua University

◇ Treasurer:

● Yajing Zhang, Soochow University

● Xueying Zhang, Peking University

◇ Webmaster:

● Hui Liu, Peking University

If you have any question about paper submission, please contact program co-chairs via nlpcc-2020-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com. For more information about the conference, please email to nlpcc@pku.edu.cn.