A regional version of ICON (As a part of ICON 2017 to be held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)

The Natural Language Association of India (NLPAI) has recently taken an initiative to promote NLP conferences or symposia focusing on regional languages of India. One such symposium was held in December 2014, co-located with ICON-2014 at Goa, focused on Dravidian languages. In 2015 it was held at Punjabi University, Patiala. Last year it was held at IIT BHU as a part of ICON 2016. The idea is to motivate NLP work on languages of various regions of India, including those which are not "official" languages (i.e., not scheduled), and to disseminate such work to the larger community. Such a conference or symposium will allow researchers with common interests to come together and share their results and have discussions. In continuation of that policy, it has been decided that the next regional conference (regICON 2017) will be held at Indian Institute of Information Technology Manipur (IIITM) and it will be focused on 16 languages of the eastern region of India, specially the NE language. The work featured at the conference will include building NLP tools and systems and creating computationally useful resources for their respective languages. Some languages of interest include all the languages in the North-Eastern states (Manipur, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh) and also the languages of West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The conference (regICON: Regional ICON) will feature papers and presentations on various researches conducted on the theme - Indic Language Processing: Situation, Challenges and Solutions - conducted by researchers from universities and institutions from Globe. It will also include keynote talks by distinguished invited speakers and a panel discussion. We seek participation of researchers from both computer science and linguistics backgrounds.