2013Q3 Reports: COLING 2012

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

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.

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.

The Main Conference was held from 10 to 14 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 participation in the 15 workshops 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. Out of the six tutorials 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.

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. The Best Paper Award was given to “Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars”, Luan Nguyen, Marten Van Schijndel and William Schuler, University of Minnesota, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Minneapolis, and The Ohio State University, Dept. of Linguistics, Columbus.

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 kilometres from Mumbai.

A more detailed report is available at http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/documents/COLING-2012_Final_Report_on_05.02.13.pdf.