Call for Papers: The 9th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing(NLPCC2020)

October 14-18, 2020, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China

Submission Deadline: May 15, 2020

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). NLPCC is recognized by CCF as a category C conference recently.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), Dalian (2017), Hohhot (2018), , and Dunhuang (2019).

Today, NLP and CC technologies are among the most active research and development areas due to the 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.

NLPCC 2020 welcomes original technical papers on new concepts, innovative research, systems, standards, testing and evaluation, applications, and industrial case studies related to NLP and CC. Authors are invited to submit complete and unpublished papers in English or Chinese in the following categories:
Applications/tools
Empirical/data-driven approaches
Resources and evaluation
Theoretical
Survey papers

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

Relevant topics of NLPCC 2020 include, but are not limited to, the following:
Computational Social Science and Social Media
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Ethics and Privacy
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation and Multilinguality
Multimodal Language Processing
NLP Applications
NLP for Minority and Low-resource Languages
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other areas
Semantic Web, Knowledge Base, and Knowledge Graph
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding
Summarization and Generation
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

Submission Guidelines
The proceedings of the conference will be published as a volume in the Springer LNAI series (EI and ISTP indexed, for English papers), and the ACTA Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Pekinensis (EI and Scopus indexed, for Chinese papers), respectively.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/nlpcc/Main-English-2020), and Chinese papers should be submitted to the Chinese Track (https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-Chinese-2020). Authors of Chinese submissions are required to provide Chinese titles in the submission system.

All submissions should be in PDF format.

Double-Blind Reviewing

Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing:
Every research paper submitted to NLPCC 2020 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/2020.
For more information about paper submission, contact program co-chairs.

Important dates
Paper Submission Deadlines: May 15, 2020 (23:59, Beijing Time)
Main Track: https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-English-2020
Chinese Track: https://www.softconf.com/nlpcc/Main-Chinese-2020
Notification: July 30, 2020
Tutorials: October 14-16, 2020
Main Conference: October 17-18, 2020
All deadlines are 23:59 PM, Beijing.

Awards and Grants

Best Paper Awards and Best Student Paper Awards
Award committee will be appointed by the Program Committee Co-Chairs to select best papers in a separated round of review. The best paper awards and best student awards are sponsored by Microsoft Research.

Travel Grants
Grants are available for students with first-author accepted long papers. Preference will be given to applicants employed or studying in the western or middle regions of China and overseas 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 (October 17, 2020) can apply for free registration of NLPCC 2020.

Organization
General Chairs:
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
Xuanjing Huang, Fudan University
PC Chairs:
Xiaodan Zhu, Queen's University
Min Zhang, Tsinghua University