First Information Letter

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce that Dialog 2012, the 18th annual International Conference, will take place from May 30 to June 3. The venue, to be specified later, will be a resort facility in the Moscow region.

The conference will be held under the auspices of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and organizational support of ABBYY.

Dialogue 2012 will be held with the assistance of:

• The Linguistics Institute of the Russian State University for the Humanities
• The Institute of Informatics Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• The Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• The Philological Faculty of Moscow State University
• Yandex
• ABBYY

The conference will focus on the following issues embracing theoretical research and applications:

• Formal language models and applications
• Linguistic semantics and semantic analysis
• Linguistic ontologies
• Theoretical and computational lexicography
• Creation and use of computer-based lexical resources
• Corpus linguistics. Creation, use and evaluation of corpora
• Internet as a linguistic resource. Linguistic technologies in the Internet
• Speech analysis and synthesis
• Machine translation
• Communication models. Communication, dialog and speech act
• Knowledge acquisition from texts
• Computer-aided document analysis: abstracting, classification, data search, etc.

The conference program includes plenary meetings, special and poster sessions, round tables, demonstrations of software systems. The papers accepted to the conference will be published in the Conference Proceedings volume, in printed, CD and website format. The papers that receive positive reviews but not accepted in the main program will be published at the conference site (with the consent of the authors).

Dominant topics

Each year the Program Committee chooses several dominant topics for the next conference. For these topics, the conference offers special sessions, round tables, and review lectures by invited speakers.

This year’s dominant topics are the following:

Sentiment analysis (assessment of the speaker’s / writer’s attitude to a topic covered by a document) is today a very popular practical task for computer-aided text analysis. This task can be regarded as completely independent, to be solved with machine learning tools that take account of certain basic linguistic parameters. On the other hand, sentiment analysis can be based on deep content analysis of the document. The diversity of existing approaches makes this topic particularly interesting.
As this year’s ROMIP (All-Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar) has a competition track on sentiment analysis, we plan to discuss the results of this creative competition during the Dialogue within the framework of a special Round Table.

Linguistic annotation is a very important direction in modern computational linguistics, which is related to the fact that success of linguistic researchers and machine learning specialists largely depends on the availability of linguistically tagged corpora and tagging quality. However, manual tagging is an extremely expensive procedure and methods of computer aided analysis of documents which help automate the procedure remain very much in demand. We believe that the task of linguistic annotation lies within the scope of interest for the majority of Dialogue’s participants.
For both dominant topics, we are planning to invite some of the world’s leading researchers who will give special talks and participate in round tables.

Competitions of natural language processing systems, aimed at the development of reliable assessment criteria for such systems, are becoming a tradition with the Dialogue. This year’s Dialogue features the results of syntactic parsing competition.

Working languages

The Conference has two working languages, Russian and English. This reflects the relation between the two goals that are of equal importance for Dialogue:
- Creation of resources, models and technologies that could benefit the studies of the Russian language
- Overcoming the methodological and technological lagging of Russian computational linguistics with regard to the world level in the area, which, despite progress made over the recent years, is still there.
To achieve the second goal, the Dialogue Program Committee is guided by international evaluation standards for submissions, including through peer reviewing. For the same reason we insist that all contributions within the international mainstream be made in English, which naturally makes the participation of foreign colleagues much more beneficial. 
In line with this, all submissions not directly associated with the linguistic study of Russian and/or other languages of Russia and the CIS should be submitted in English. The authors are expected to present their accepted papers in English, too. We will also ask the authors of papers submitted in Russian to provide extended English summaries.

Selection criteria for contributions
Dialogue is, traditionally, an interdisciplinary conference aiming at communication between theoretical linguists and developers of applied linguistic technologies. Anyone willing to participate is asked to take account of this tradition when choosing the topics, content and format of their talks.
Dialogue retains a traditionally broad scope of research areas; however, the Program Committee reserves the right to reject the contributions likely to be understandable by, and interesting to, narrow specialists only. Research done within scientific theories, description or analysis models which are not commonly known will only be accepted if an introduction representing the corresponding research paradigm is given. Our reviewers will do their best to determine whether a theoretical talk contains a clearly formulated and solved task, and whether a contribution presenting applied research has a verifiable result obtained on the basis of adequate linguistic material.

Submission

We accept complete texts of papers with abstracts in Russian and in English until February 10th. To submit your paper, please register here. You will find detailed instructions on registration and submission on our site. Note that the Requirements for the preparation of talks have been significantly changed as compared to previous year.

Reviewing

The results of reviewing will be made known before or on March 19. For more information about reviewing and publication procedures please visit the conference site.
The authors of the accepted papers may receive remarks and suggestions from the reviewers. All authors are expected to upload the final versions of papers, prepared with consideration of the reviewers’ remarks and formatted in full accordance with the requirements by the end of March. The deadlines will be individually determined for each participant, depending on when the decisions are made by the Editorial Board. Please note that the organizers do not guarantee that the papers uploaded after the deadline will be published.

Important Dates

Submission of complete texts deadline: February 10
Program Committee decision: March 5-19
Submission of final versions of accepted papers:  March 19-31
Publication of the conference program: soon after May 5
Conference: May 30– June 3

Please refer to the Dialog site for more information. 

You can make suggestions to the conference or ask your questions at the forum.
The conference organizing committee has a supply of Dialog Proceedings volumes for 1995-2011. We are happy to offer them to universities, departments, libraries and private individuals free of charge on a self pickup basis. The Proceedings can also be mailed at the expense of the addressee.

For any questions please contact the Secretary at secretary@dialog-21.ru.

Please forward this letter to any colleagues of yours who may be interested in participating in the Dialogue.

Yours,
Dialog 2012 organizing committee