24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

COLING 2012 - A Report Introduction The 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics was held at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, from 8th to 15th December, 2012. It was organized by CFILT (Centre for Indian Language Technology), Computer Science and

Engineering Department, IIT Bombay TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages programme) of the

Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, India

The conference was held under the umbrella of ICCL (International Committee on Computational Linguistics). The event was sponsored by TCS and LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore, (Diamond sponsors) Microsoft Research and Baidu (Gold sponsors) Yahoo!, IBM, ezDi Enago (Silver sponsors)

COLING Banner and Conference Venue

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Conference Chairs The Program Chairs were Prof. Martin Kay, Stanford University, USA, and Prof. Christian Boitet, University Joseph Fourier, France. The Organizing Chairs were Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, IIT Bombay and Prof. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT Hyderabad. The Workshop Chair was Prof. Laurent Besacier, University Joseph Fourier, France and the Tutorial Chair was Prof. Sadao Kurohashi, Kyoto University, Japan. The Publication Chair was Prof. Roger Evans, University of Brighton, UK.

Program Chairs – Prof. Christian Boitet and Prof. Martin Kay

Organizing Chair – Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Organizing Co-Chair – Prof. Rajeev Sangal

Dates and Venue The Main Conference was held from 10th to 14th December, 2012. There were pre-conference workshops and tutorials on 8th and 9th December, 2012, and post-conference workshops were held on 15th December, 2012. The venues were VMCC (Victor Menezes Convention Centre) and the convocation hall, IIT Bombay.

Registration Desk Lunch at the Venue

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Social Events The social events associated with the conference included a reception on the 10th evening which showcased performances by delegates and organizers. A banquet was organized on the 11th evening at Hotel Renaissance. A whole day excursion to Karla and Bhaja caves was conducted on the 12th. These beautifully carved rock-cut Buddhist caves, dating back to the 2nd century BC, are located 60 kilometers from Mumbai. The caves, initially associated with the Hinayana sect of Buddhism, feature intricately carved Chaityas, or prayer halls and Viharas, or dwelling places for monks. Their arched entrances and vaulted interiors are notable. There was a cultural evening dedicated to Indian classical music on the 13th which consisted of a tabla recital by Shri. Prasad Padhye and a Sitar recital by Pt. Nayan Ghosh.

Reception The Banquet

Excursion - Karla Caves Cultural Evening

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Invited Talks

There were invited talks which were delivered on all the four days of the main conference. On 10th Dec, Day 1, Prof. Barbara Moser-Mercer, University of Geneva, spoke on “The adaptive brain: acquiring a complex cognitive skill in complex contexts. Prof. Makato Nagao, Japan, gave a talk on “Digital Book, Digital Library, and Natural Language Processing”on 11th Dec, Day 2. “Minimum Description Length as the basis of Panini's grammar” was the topic of the talk given by Prof. Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University on 13th Dec, Day 4, and ” Prof. Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT Hyderabad, gave a talk on the topic “NLP from Paninian Perspective” on 14th Dec, Day 5.

Prof. Barbara Moser-Mercer Prof. Makato Nagao

Prof. Paul Kiparsky Prof. Dipti Mishra Sharma

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Papers The conference saw an unprecedented number of over 1000 submissions, out of which 173 were accepted as oral presentations (long papers), 138 as poster presentations, 66 as Demos and 22 papers were kept as reserve. All presentations were well-attended and saw fruitful interaction among delegates.

The Best Paper Award was given to “Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars”, Luan Nguyen1, Marten Van Schijndel2 and William Schuler2 (1: University of Minnesota, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Minneapolis, MN, 2: The Ohio State University, Dept. of Linguistics, Columbus, OH , lnguyen@cs.umn.edu, vanschm@ling.osu.edu, schuler@ling.osu.edu)

Paper presentation Delegates attending a presentation

Demo in progress Best Paper Award

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Nationality wise Participation There were a total of 763 registrations out of which 612 delegates attended the conference. 606 delegates attended the Main Conference, 99 were at the Tutorials and 336 attended the Workshops. Nationality wise 454 delegates were from Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, 217 from Europe, and 82 were from USA, North America and South America.

Participation: Nationality wise Distribution

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Workshop The participation in the 15 workshops (see appendix A) was fairly evenly distributed. Out of the total participation there was 10% attendance in the one on Information Extraction & Entity Analytics on Social Media Data, followed by 9% in the Sixth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data.

Workshop Participation

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Tutorial Out of the six tutorials (see appendix B) there was 29% attendance in Exploiting Web Data Sources for Advanced NLP, 25% in Temporal Information Extraction and Shallow Temporal Reasoning, 15% in Revisiting Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for NLP, 12% in Open-domain Conversations With Humanoid Robots, 10% in Multimodal Corpora and 9% in The Hindi/Urdu Treebank: New Frontiers in Hindi and Urdu NLP.

Tutorial Participation

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Areas The following areas were covered in the conference (see Appendix C): Indian Language Technology Under resourced languages Morphology and POS Tagging Grammar and Formalisms Parsing Semantics Discourse and pragmatics Coreference resolution Ontologies and terminologies Textual entailment Resources and annotations Psychological and Neurological Modelling Empirical Machine Translation Deployment of NLP applications Expert or hybrid machine translation Hybrid man + machine architectures & human factors Information & content extraction Information retrieval Named entity recognition Natural Language Generation Question answering Sentiment and text classification Speech recognition and synthesis Summarization Word sense disambiguation

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Concluding Remarks The conference saw presentations of very high quality research papers, tutorials and workshops. India’s presence was commendable. Out of a total of 251 registered Indian delegates, 219 participated in the conference and out of the 193 accepted papers in the main conference (Oral, Poster and Demo) 42 papers were from India. The conference presented a unique opportunity to send out following messages to students and young researchers:

• Clear goal • Clear Technique • Clear evaluation • Clear error analysis and path to improve

Mr. F.C. Kohli speaking at the Valedictory function Panel at the Valedictory Function

Audience

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

Appendix:

A. Workshops

1. “Advances in discourse analysis and its computational Aspects”: Eva Hajicova

2. “Second Workshop on Advances in Text Input Methods (WTIM 2)”: Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Yoh Okuno

3. “Eye-tracking and Natural Language Processing”: Michael Carl,

Pushpak Bhattacharya, Kamal Kumar Choudhary

4. “3rd Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (SANLP)”: Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Abbas Malik

5. “Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-III)”: Michael Zock,

Reinhard Rapp

6. “10th Workshop on Asian Language Resources”: Ruvan Weerasinghe, Rachel Edita O. Roxas, Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Sarmad Hussain

7. “2nd Workshop on Sentiment Analysis where AI meets Psychology

(SAAIP 2012)”: Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Manabu Okumura

8. “Sixth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data”: Lipika Dey, Daniel Lopresti, Christoph Ringlstetter, Shourya Roy, L. Venkata Subramaniam

9. “Information Extraction & Entity Analytics on Social Media Data”:

Sriram Raghavan, Ganesh Ramakrishnan

10. “Machine Translation and Parsing in Indian Languages (MTPIL-2012)”: Radhika Mamidi, Ranjani Parthasarathi, Sobha Lalitha Devi, Dipti Misra Sharma, Joseph van Genabith

11. “Second Workshop on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to

Optimise the Division of Labour in Hybrid MT (ML4HMT-12 WS and Shared Task)”: Josef van Genabith, Toni Badia, Christian Federmann

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

12. “Speech and Language Processing Tools in Education”: Radhika Mamidi, Kishore Prahallad

13. “Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation”: Karthik

Visweswariah, Ananthakrishnan Ramanathan, Mitesh M. Khapra

14. “Question Answering for Complex Domains”: Nanda Kambhatla, Sachindra Joshi, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Kiran Kate, Priyanka Agrawal

15. “First International Workshop on Optimization Techniques for Human

Language Technology”: Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Asif Ekbal, Sriparna Saha, Mark Johnson, Diego Molla-Aliod

B. Tutorials

1. “Temporal Information Extraction and Shallow Temporal Reasoning”: Dan Roth, Heng Ji, Taylor Cassidy, Quang Do

2. “Exploiting Web Data Sources for Advanced NLP”: Gerard de Melo

3. “Multimodal Corpora”: Patrizia Paggio, Dirk Heylen, Costanza

Navarretta

4. “The Hindi/Urdu Treebank: New Frontiers in Hindi and Urdu Natural Language Processing”: Owen Rambow, Dipti Misra Sharma, Ashwini Vaidya

5. “Open-domain Conversations with Humanoid Robots”: Kristiina

Jokinen, Graham Wilcock

6. “Revisiting Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for NLP”: Jagadeesh Jagarlamudi, Raghavendra Udupa

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

C. Areas and Country wise Participation The following are the areas covered in the conference, along with the percentage of country wise participation.

• Indian Language Technology - 80% participation from India and 5% each from Spain, Singapore, France and Hong Kong Special administrative region of China.

• Under resourced languages - 14% participation from India and the United States of America, 9% each from Sweden, Spain, Japan and China.

• Morphology and POS Tagging – 17% each from India, the United States and China, 9% from Japan, 8% from United Arab Emirates, and 4% each from Japan, Lebanon, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Taiwan, United Kingdom and Bulgaria.

• Grammar and Formalisms – 20% from Canada, and 10% each from United States, China, Germany, Egypt, Hungary, Poland, Singapore and and Hong Kong Special administrative region of China.

• Parsing – 28% from China, 17% from Germany, 11% from Australia, United States and Japan, 6% each from Singapore and Norway, and 5% each from France and Croatia.

• Semantics – 24% from United States, 19% each from Germany and United Kingdom, 5% each from Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, Israel and India, and 4% each from Canada and France.

• Discourse and pragmatics – 28% from United States, 17% from China, 11% from France, 6% each from Hong Kong, Japan, United Kingdom and Germany, and 5% each from Finland, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

• Coreference resolution – 25% from the United States, 17% each from India and Germany, 9% from Belgium, and 8% each from China, Poland, Japan and Italy.

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

• Ontologies and terminologies – 22% from United States, 15% from China and 7% each from Canada, Ethiopia, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom.

• Textual entailment – 50% from United States and 25% each from Japan and China.

• Resources and annotations - 20% from United States , 14% Germany and 10% each from France and Italy, 7% each from China, Taiwan and Japan, 4% from Brazil, and 3% each from the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Hong Kong, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

• Psychological and Neurological Modelling - 50% from United States, 25% from Japan, 13% from China and 12% from Australia.

• Empirical Machine Translation – 31% from China, 13% each from

Germany and the United States, 9% each from France and the United Kingdom, 5% from Iran, and 4% each from Ireland, Spain, Qatar, Macau and the Republic of Korea.

• Deployment of NLP applications - 15% each from Japan and Taiwan,

10% each from France and the Republic of Korea, and 5% each from China, Canada, Germany, India, Norway, Qatar, Romania, the Russian Federation, United Kingdom and the United States.

• Expert or hybrid machine translation - 22% each from France and China,

14% from Japan, and 7% each from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, United States and Taiwan.

• Hybrid man + machine architectures & human factors – 34% from the

Czech Republic, and 33% each from Iran and France.

• Information & content extraction – 15% each from Germany and United States, 10% each from Australia, China and Iran, and 5% each from Ireland, Italy, Japan, Romania, Singapore, Taiwan and Turkey.

• Information retrieval – 28% from China, 17% from India, 11% each from Ireland and Germany, 6% each from Pakistan, Spain and United States, and 5% each from Hong Kong, France, Japan.

24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2012, IIT Bombay

• Named entity recognition – 28% from Germany, and 9% each from

France, China, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and India.

• Natural Language Generation – 28% from France, 27% from United Kingdom, 18% from Germany and 9% each from Canada, Australia and Argentina.

• Question answering – 34% from China, 17% each from Japan and United States, and 8% each from India, Italy, United Kingdom and Australia.

• Sentiment and text classification – 29% from United States, 18% from Germany, 11% from India, 7% each from United Kingdom and Russian Federation, 4% each from Ireland, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Singapore, and 3% each from Denmark, China, Canada and Ireland.

• Speech recognition and synthesis – 29% from United States, 18% from Germany, 11% from India, 7% each from the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom, 4% each from Italy, Japan, Portugal and Singapore, and 3% each from Ireland, Canada, China and Denmark.

• Summarization – 48% from China, 10 % from United States, 9% each from Japan, India and Canada, and 5% each from Greece, Singapore and Sweden.

• Word sense disambiguation – 27% each from Germany and United

States, 13% from France, 7% each from India, Japan and Taiwan, and 6% each from China and the Czech Republic.

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