CICLing

CICLing is a series of international conferences devoted to computational linguistics (CL), intelligent text processing, natural language processing (NLP), human language technologies (HLT), natural-language human-computer interaction (HCI), and speech processing and speech recognition (SR).

CICLing was founded in 2000. In 2009, the 10th event is held. By 2009, the CICLing events have been held in Mexico, South Korea, and Israel. The organizers welcome applications for holding CICLing in other countries.

Webpage and proceedings

The CICLing webpage announces the forthcoming event and lists the past keynote speakers, the past events, and past venues. It also gives links to all proceedings, some available freely in full text and some freely available as abstracts, while the full text is available for a fee from the editorial house. The Springer editorial house permits the authors to put a copy of the paper to their personal webpage, so one can search for the full text by the title.

Format

Typically, a day is started with a keynote talk and ended with an informal event organized by the same keynote speaker. An "informal event" is a notion introduced with CICLing. Such event lasts about 1 hour, and its contents is completely defined by the invited speaker. The only condition is that it must not be "yet another talk" but instead must be something that is not seen at other conferences: a discussion, an experiment, a story about what is behind the scene in research or the life of a scientist, a reflection on the past and future of computational lingtuistics, etc.

Half of the time of the conference is devoted to cultural program, to encourage informal interaction between the attendees. The tours are usually organized to places difficult to reach for ordinary tourists and to unique marvels of nature or history, not simply to a nice church in the downtown. However, most of the cultural events are scheduled before and after the technical sessions, for those attendees that cannot afford going to the tours. Keynote speakers are explicitly encourage to attend all the tours, where the attendees can speak with them in informal atmosphere, or even sit next to them in the bus and pass hours with them.

The keynote talks are published in full text (not as abstracts) in the proceedings. Keynote lectures are also videotaped, and the recordings are made available via the conference website.

Topics of interest

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: text processing, computational morphology, tagging, stemming, syntactic analysis, parsing and shallow parsing, chunking, recognizing textual entailment, ambiguity resolution, semantic analysis, pragmatics, lexicon, lexical resources, dictionaries and machine-readable dictionaries (MRD), grammar, anaphora resolution, word sense disambiguation (WSD), machine translation (MT), information retrieval (IR), information extraction (IE), document handling, document classification and text classification, text summarization, text mining (TM), and spell checking (spelling).

Why CICLing?

Some factors that define its identity are:

• Excellent keynote speakers. The conference invites the most prominent experts to give keynote talks which, unlike at many other conferences, are published in extenso in the proceedings. These expert also organize an additional tutorials or discussions, and usually participate in the tours and social life, where you can speak with them in an informal environment.

• Prestigious publication. Proceedings are usually published in the Springer LNCS series, which is distributed to hundreds of libraries worldwide and is indexed by major indices. CICLing is included in the CORE list of conferences, which is important at some universities for promotion scoring.

• General interest. The conference covers nearly all topics related to computational linguistics. This makes it attractive for people from different areas and leads to vivid and interesting discussions and exchange of opinions.

• Informal interaction. The conference is intended for a rather small group of professionals. This allows for informal and friendly atmosphere, more resembling a friendly party than an official event. At CICLing, the attendees can pass hours speaking with most famous experts who one could hardly greet in the crowd at larger conferences.

• Excellent tours. The conference is intended for people young in their souls, adventurous explorers in both science and life. The conference's cultural program brings the attendees to unique marvels of history and nature hidden from ordinary tourists.

• Relief from frosts. In the middle of winter frosts, the attendees from Northern countries enjoy bright warm sun under the shadow of palms.