The CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) is the annual meeting of CCF-NLP (Technical Committee of Natural Language Processing, China Computer Federation, formerly known as 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 in the list of CS conferences recommended by CCF. 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), Dunhuang (2019), and Zhengzhou (2020).

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 2021 welcomes original technical papers on new concepts, innovative research, systems, standards, resources & 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 Authors are invited to submit complete and unpublished papers in English or Chinese in the following categories: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 2021 include, but are not limited to, the following:

◇ Computational Social Science and Social Media

◇ Dialogue and Interactive Systems

◇ Discourse and Pragmatics

◇ Ethics and NLP

◇ Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition

◇ 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

◇ NLP Applications

◇ Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

◇ Question Answering

◇ Resources and Evaluation

◇ Semantics

◇ Sentiment Analysis

◇ Speech and Multimodality

◇ Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

◇ Text Summarization and Generation

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 and 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. All submissions should be prepared in the PDF format.

Manuscripts (including both English and Chinese papers) should be submitted electronically through the Softconf START conference management system (https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-2021). After logging in, please click the "make a new submission" button, and select the corresponding link according to your paper's language. Email submissions will not be accepted. Authors of Chinese submissions are required to provide Chinese titles in the submission system.

Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing:

Every research paper submitted to NLPCC 2021 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 workshops will be available on the conference website soon.

All papers accepted by NLPCC 2021 workshops will be published in a combined volume of the NLPCC 2021 Proceedings.

◇ Paper Submission Deadline: June 8, 2021 (Extended)

◇ Paper Notification: July 30, 2021

◇ Camera-ready Deadline: August 14, 2021

◇ Tutorials: October 13-14, 2021

◇ Workshops: October 15, 2021

◇ Main Conference: October 16-17, 2021

All deadlines are 23:59 PM, Beijing Time.

◇ Organizer:

● China Computer Federation (CCF)

◇ Hosts:

● Shandong 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:

● Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne

● Jie Tang, Tsinghua University

◇ PC Chairs:

● Lu Wang, University of Michigan

● Yansong Feng, Peking University

◇ Student Workshop Chairs:

● Fang Kong, Soochow University

● Meishan Zhang, Tianjin University

◇ Evaluation Chairs:

● Jiajun Zhang, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

● Yunbo Cao, Tencent

◇ Tutorial Chairs:

● Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University

● Zhongyu Wei, Fudan University

◇ Publication Chairs:

● Yu Hong, Soochow University

● Ruifang He, Tianjin University

◇ Journal Coordinator:

● Yunfang Wu, Peking University

◇ Conference Handbook Chair:

● Xiaomeng Song, Shandong University

◇ Sponsorship Chairs:

● Dongyan Zhao, Peking University

● Zhaochun Ren, Shandong University

◇ Publicity Chairs:

● Wei Jia, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)

● Jing Li, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

● Ruifeng Xu, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)

◇ Organization Chairs:

● Zhumin Chen, Shandong University

● Pengjie Ren, Shandong University

● Xiaojun Wan, Peking University

◇ Treasurer:

● Yajing Zhang, Soochow University

● Xueying Zhang, Peking University

◇ Webmaster:

● Hui Liu, Peking University

◇ Area Chairs:

      Fundamentals of NLP:

● Liang Huang, Oregon State University

● Kewei Tu, ShanghaiTech University

      Machine Translation and Multilinguality:

● Derek Wong, University of Macau

● Boxing Chen, Alibaba Group

      Machine Learning for NLP:

● Yangfeng Ji, University of Virginia

● Lingpeng Kong, The University of Hong Kong

      Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph:

● Lifu Huang, Virginia Tech

● Shizhu He, Chinese Academy of Sciences

      Summarization and Generation:

● Rui Zhang, Penn State University

● Jin-ge Yao, Microsoft Research

      Question Answering:

● Huan Sun, The Ohio State University

● Yiming Cui, Harbin Institute of Technology

      Dialogue Systems:

● Jessy Li, The University of Texas at Austin

● Wei Wu, Meituan

      Social Media and Sentiment Analysis:

● Fei Liu, University of Central Florida

● Duyu Tang, Tencent AI Lab

      NLP Applications and Text Mining:

● Wenpeng Yin, Salesforce Research

● Zhunchen Luo, PLA Academy of Military Science

      Multimodality and Explainability:

● Xin Wang, UC Santa Cruz

● Zhongyu Wei, Fudan University

If you have any questions about paper submission, please contact Program Co-Chairs via nlpcc2021-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com. For more information about the conference, please email to nlpcc@pku.edu.cn.