The Seventh CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing（NLPCC 2018）

Submission Deadlines:
Chinese Track：Sunday, April 15, 2018
Main Track：Tuesday, May 8, 2018
August 26-30, 2018, Inner Mongolia Xincheng Hotel, Hohhot, China
http://tcci.ccf.org.cn/conference/2018/

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）. 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）, and Dalian（2017）.

Today, NLP and CC technologies are among the most active research and development areas due to 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. The Seventh Conference of NLPCC will focus on Natural Language Analysis and Understanding in Big Data including Fundamental Research in Language Computing, Multilingual Access, Web Mining/Text Mining, Machine Learning for NLP, Knowledge Graph, Information Extraction, Question Answering, Information Retrieval, Chatbot, NLP for Social Networks, as well as the Applications of Language Computing.

Noticeably, NLPCC 2018 keynote speakers include Joyce Chai（Michigan State University, USA）, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil（Cornell University, USA）, Charles Ling（University of Western Ontario, Canada）, and Luo Si（Alibaba, China）.

NLPCC 2018 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Authors are invited to submit complete and unpublished papers in English or in Chinese in the following categories:
◇ Applications/tools
◇ Empirical/data-driven approaches
◇ Resources and evaluation
◇ Theoretical
◇ Survey papers

Authors are encouraged to submit their papers with accompanying software and data whenever applicable. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation score, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making acceptance/rejection decisions.

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

Relevant topics of NLPCC 2018 include, but are not limited to, the following:
◇ Fundamentals of Language Computing
◇ Word Segmentation & Named Entity Recognition
◇ Syntactic Parsing, Semantic Analysis, Discourse Analysis
◇ NLP for Minority and Low-resource Languages
◇ Applications of Natural Language Processing
◇ Digital Publishing, Document Engineering, OCR & Fonts Computing
◇ NLP for Mobile Computing
◇ Machine Translation & Multilingual Information Access
◇ Machine Learning for NLP
◇ Web/Text Mining & Big Data
◇ Information Retrieval & Extraction
◇ Knowledge Representation & Acquisition
◇ Personalization & Recommendation
◇ Semantic Web & Knowledge Base
◇ NLP for Search & Ads
◇ Query & Document Understanding
◇ Topic Detection & Tracking
◇ Sentiment Analysis & Opinion Mining
◇ Question Answering, Chatbot & User Interaction
◇ Social Computing
◇ Rumour Detection

Submission Guidelines
English submissions should follow the LNCS formatting instructions, without exceeding twelve（12）pages; 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 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/NLPCC2018/Main-English）, and Chinese papers should be submitted to the Chinese Track（https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2018/Main-Chinese）. Authors of Chinese submissions are required to provide Chinese titles in the submission system. All student first authors are encouraged to contact nlpcc@pku.edu.cn, indicating their names, affiliations, and the titles of their submissions.

High quality research papers in English will be selected for significant revision and recommended to 2 SCIE-Indexed Journals：the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing（TALLIP）, and the International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics. The revised papers will be published at the journals after successfully going through the normal review process of the journals.

All submissions should be in PDF format.
Double-Blind Reviewing
Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing:
Every research paper submitted to NLPCC 2018 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.
Submission details are provided on the conference website：http://tcci.ccf.org.cn/conference/2018.
For more information about paper submission, contact program co-chair（nlpcc2018@gmail.com）.
Events
In addition to technical contributions, NLPCC 2018 invites proposals for workshops, panels, technical evaluations and industry presentations. For workshops, NLPCC 2018 will provide administrative support for workshop room booking, registration and publication. All papers accepted by NLPCC 2018 workshops will be published in a combined volume of the NLPCC 2018 Proceedings.
Proposals or industry papers should be sent as e-mail attachments to zhaody@pku.edu.cn before April 10, 2018.
Important dates

◇ Paper Submission Deadlines:
● April 15, 2018（Chinese Track, 23:59, Beijing Time）, https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2018/Main-Chinese/
● May 8, 2018（Main Track, 23:59, Beijing Time）, https://www.softconf.com/NLPCC2018/Main-English/
◇ Notification：June 15, 2018
◇ Camera ready：June 30, 2018
◇ Tutorials / CCF Advanced Disciplines Lectures（ADL）：August 26-28, 2018
◇ Main Conference：August 29-30, 2018
It is important to note that, since extra time is required to review Chinese papers by the ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis, the paper submission deadline is about three weeks earlier for Chinese papers.
Awards and Grants

◇ Best Paper Awards and Best Student Paper Awards
A sub-committee will be appointed by the Program Committee Co-Chairs to select best papers in a two-round double-blinded review process for the awards, sponsored by Microsoft Research Asia.
◇ Travel Grants
Grants are available for the first author of any accepted long paper. Preference will be given to applicants employed or studying in the western or middle regions of China and oversea 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（August 29, 2018）can apply for free registration of NLPCC 2018.
◇ Expo and Industrial Demo Grants
All participants who will attend the Industrial Expo of NLPCC 2018 can apply for the Expo Grants. The grants will provide free booth and exhibition registration to selected participants who demonstrates outstanding novel technology or product.
Contacts：nlpcc@pku.edu.cn or zhaody@pku.edu.cn.

Organization

◇ Organizer:
● China Computer Federation（CCF）
◇ Hosts:
● Inner Mongolia University
● National State Key Laboratory of Digital Publishing, Founder Group, China
◇ General Chairs:
● Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania, danroth@seas.upenn.edu
● Chengqing Zong, Institute of Automation, CAS, cqzong@nlpr.ia.ac.cn
◇ PC Co-Chairs:
● Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas, vince@hlt.utdallas.edu
● Min Zhang, Soochow University, minzhang@suda.edu.cn
◇ Chinese Track/ Student Workshop Co-Chairs:
● Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University, aihuang@tsinghua.edu.cn
● Jingsong Su, Xiamen University, jssu@xmu.edu.cn
◇ Evaluation Co-Chairs:
● Nan Duan, Microsoft Research Asia, nanduan@microsoft.com
● Xiaojun Wan, Peking University, wanxiaojun@pku.edu.cn
◇ ADL/Tutorial Co-Chairs:
● Wenliang Chen, Soochow University, wlchen@suda.edu.cn
● Rui Yan, Peking University, ruiyan@pku.edu.cn
◇ Publication Co-Chairs:
● Sujian Li, Peking University, lisujian@pku.edu.cn
● Hongying Zan, Zhengzhou University, iehyzan@zzu.edu.cn
◇ Sponsorship Co-Chairs:
● Kai-Fam Wong, Hong Kong Chinese University, kfwong@se.cuhk.edu.hk
● Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research Asia, mingzhou@microsoft.com
◇ Publicity Co-Chair:
● Wanxiang Che, Harbin Institute of Technology, car@ir.hit.edu.cn
● Qi Zhang, Fudan University, qz@fudan.edu.cn
● Yangsen Zhang, Beijing University of Information Science and Technology, zhangyangsen@163.com
◇ Organization Committee Co-Chairs:
● Guanglai Gao, Inner Mongolia University, csggl@imu.edu.cn
● Ruifeng Xu, Harbin Institute of Technology, xuruifeng@hit.edu.cn
● Dongyan Zhao, Peking University, zhaody@pku.edu.cn
◇ Publishers:
● Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence（LNAI）, Springer Verlag
● ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis