CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
SIMPLE'04
Symposium on Indian Morphology, Phonology & Language Engineering
19-20 March, 2004
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
&
The Communication Empowerment Laboratory
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
in collaboration with
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore

Co-sponsored by NLP Association of India

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Communication Empowerment Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in collaboration with Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore is organizing SIMPLE '04 - "Symposium on Indian Morphology, Phonology and Language Engineering" on 19 - 20 March, 2004.

The objective of the symposium is to facilitate interaction between linguists, computational linguists and NLP researchers from different parts of India, who are working on similar problems but with different Indian languages and problem solving approaches, leading to sharing of ideas, results and resources. Researchers can present an overview of their ongoing activities, demonstrate NLP tools and systems, and discuss significant results and future directions of work. Interested researchers are requested to indicate their intent to participate by sending an email to <simple@mla.iitkgp.ernet.in>.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

SIMPLE will focus on technology, models, systems and standards for Indian languages, especially languages of Eastern and North-Eastern India. Particular topics of interest for the Symposium include (but are not limited to):

Fonts and Encoding:
- Standards, Generic Font Converters, Computational Studies of Scripts

Phonological Processing:

Phonological Modelling of Indian Languages,
Grapheme-to-phoneme/ Phoneme-to-grapheme Converters,
Creation of Phone/Diphone dictionaries and databases,
Morpho-phonology

Morphological Processing:

Modelling of Inflectional Morphology for Indian Languages,
Modelling of Derivational Morphology,
Morphological Synthesizers / Analyzers
Lexical Resources for Morphological Processing

Part-of-Speech Tagging:

POS Tag sets for Indian Languages,
Statistical & Rule-based POS taggers,
Language resources for POS tagging

Developing Indian Language Corpora:

Issues in building Tagged Corpora/Parallel Corpora for MT
Issues in developing Tagged Speech Corpora,
Efforts and Experiences in Corpus building,
Automatic Resource Extraction from Corpora,
Corpus-based Mathematical and Statistical Language Modelling

NLP based Applications: Description of complete systems based on NLP such as MT, TTS or Text summarization systems for Indian languages.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstracts (not exceeding 1200 words) describing research activities of a group or significant results on the topics of interest should be submitted on or before 31 January 2004. The title of the paper, name of the authors, and their addresses and emails should be clearly mentioned at the top
The proposals for technical demonstrations should clearly indicate the functionality of the system/tool to be demonstrated, the language(s) handled or processed and hardware/system requirements
The abstracts and proposals for demonstrations must be mailed to <simple@mla.iitkgp.ernet.in> in doc, pdf, ps or plain text file formats. Alternatively, 3 copies of the same can be sent by post to the following address.

Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Dist: Midnapur, West Bengal
PIN: 721302

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of Abstracts : 31 January 2004
Proposals for Demonstration : 31 January 2004
Author Notification : 15 February 2004
Symposium Opening : 19 March 2003

TRAVEL SUPPORT

There is no registration fee for SIMPLE'04 and participation is by invitation only. SIMPLE organizing committee will provide free local hospitality including local accommodation.

Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore will provide a limited number of travel and DA support. Authors of accepted papers, and speakers who are specially invited to deliver talks at the Symposium will be eligible to apply for support. Participants and paper readers from the North-East India may contact the Coordinator from CIIL for a special travel support, which will be decided on a case by case basis.

The terms and conditions of travel support are as follows :

Faculty members: AC III Tier/, I Class/ AC Chair Car subject to production of proof of travel, and DA of Rs 120 per day.
Research scholars/ students : II Class rail fare/Sleeper DA of Rs.90/- per day.
Local participants : Rs.75 as conveyance charges

Eligible participants who wish to avail of travel support may directly contact :

Dr.B.Mallikarjun
Academic Secretary
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Manasagangothri
MYSORE 570 006,INDIA
Email: mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net, drsharada@sancharnet.in
Homepage: http://www.ciil.org/faculty/mallikarjun.html

VENUE

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur