FSMNLP 2023 in Stellenbosch

The international conference series "Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing" (FSMNLP) is the premier forum of the ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods (SIGFSM). SIGFSM serves researchers and practitioners in natural language processing (NLP) working on:

• natural language processing (implementation, applications, language resources),
• theoretical aspects, or
• combinations thereof,

that have obvious relevance or an explicit relation to finite-state methods.

Important Dates

FSMNLP 2023 will be held August 28-30 in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

• May 15, 2023: Abstract submission deadline
• May 22, 2023: Paper submission deadline (cancelled)
• July 4, 2023: Notification of acceptance (cancelled)
• July 18, 2023: Camera-ready version due (cancelled)
• August 28-30, 2023: Event on-site in Stellenbosch (cancelled)

The deadlines are all at midnight Anywhere on Earth time.

Submissions are made in two stages, a submission of a preliminary abstract later followed by a submission of the paper itself. The abstract must be submitted for the paper to be considered. See the call for papers below.

(Non-)Adjacency to IJCAI 2023

Note that the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence 2023 has, unfortunately moved to Macau this year, where previously indicated that simultaneously attending both IJCAI and FSMNLP would be convenient this is no longer the case.

Registration

Registration will carry a (reasonable) fee this year.

Invited talks/tutorials

• "Why bother with rule-based NLP for the South African Bantu languages?" by Laurette Pretorius, UNISA (now an extraordinary professor at Stellenbosch University).

More invited talks are being sought and will be announced closer to the conference.

Submissions on easychair.

Submissions are made in two stages, a submission of a preliminary abstract later followed by a submission of the paper itself. Papers must present original, unpublished research and implementation results. Simultaneous submissions to FSMNLP and to another conference or workshop are allowed. According to the ACL double submission policy, doubly-submitted papers should indicate this fact on the title page. If accepted at both FSMNLP and the other meeting, such a paper must be withdrawn from one of them. Withdrawal from FSMNLP shall be as soon as possible but no later than one week after the notification of acceptance at FSMNLP.

FSMNLP accepts two kinds of submissions:

• long papers (8 pages excluding references) reporting completed, significant research,
• short papers (4 pages excluding references) reporting ongoing work and partial results, implementations, grammars, practical tools, interactive software demos, etc.

Short papers are expected to be presented as system demos, posters and/or short presentations, while long papers are presented in full talks.

All submissions are electronic and in PDF format via a web-based submission server. Authors are strongly encouraged to preparte their papers in LaTeX using the ACL 2021-12 style files to produce the PDF document. The zip archive of the style files can be downloaded here.

Information about the author(s) and other identifying information such as obvious self-references (e.g., “We showed in [12] …”) and financial or personal acknowledgements should be omitted in the submitted papers whenever feasible. You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. Versions of the paper include papers having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF on easychair

A paper may contain a clearly marked appendix and data files to support its claims. This material will not be published. While reviewers are urged to consult this extra material for better comprehension, it is at their discretion whether they do so. Such extra material should also be anonymized to the extent feasible.

Program Committee

Organizing the program committee is an ongoing effort, but so far confirmed are the following.

• Johanna Björklund (Umeå Universitet, Sweden)
• Adrien Boiret (INSA Centre Val-de-Loire)
• Jan Daciuk (Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland)
• Frank Drewes (Umeå Universitet, Sweden)
• Tim Fernando (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
• Kyle Gorman (City University of New York)
• Mike Hammond (University of Arizona, USA)
• Colin de la Higuera (Université de Nantes, France)
• Brink van der Merwe (Stellenbosch University)
• Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK)
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
• Giorgio Satta (University of Padua)
• Richard Sproat (Google, USA)
• Bruce W. Watson (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

Organizing Committee

• Bruce Watson, Stellenbosch University
• Brink van der Merwe, Stellenbosch University, abvdm@cs.sun.ac.za
• Martin Berglund, Umeå University, mbe@cs.umu.se

The conference will be held at STIAS, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, in the Manor house.

STIAS is located at 10 Marais Road, a short walk from all the most likely accomodation.

Need to fly to Cape Town International airport (CPT). For transfer from the airport we recommend either:

• Using what your accomodation recommends, most guest houses and hotels have deals with good shuttle companies.
• Uber is generally a good option in South Africa, there is a clearly marked (though often busy) dedicated pickup area at the airport.

Local Travel

Within Stellenbosch largely anything you will need (including the venue, accommodatin, and leisure) is within walking distance. Beyond that Uber is very good in South Africa, both for short trips and longer trips (e.g. going to and from Cape Town is not very cheap by Uber, but perfectly doable and quite convenient).

Accomodation

There are many good options, guest houses on Neethling street in particular. Do pay attention when booking, there are many kinds of accommodation available. We also recommend staying at a place within the easily walkable town center, roughly outlined: