<div dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">CALL FOR PAPERS</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">(</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(255,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">SPECIAL SESSION</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">: Language processing in the era of deep learning)</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Co-located @ 28-th </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> (ESANN).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">This event builds upon a very successful series of conferences organized each year since 1993. ESANN has become a major scientific event in the machine learning, computational intelligence, and artificial neural networks fields over the years.</span></p><br><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Submission deadline: </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(255,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">18 November, 2019</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Date of conference: April 22-24, 2020</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><a href="https://www.esann.org/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">https://www.esann.org</span></a></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Selected papers from the ESANN 2020 proceedings will be invited for publication of an extended version in a special issue of the </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Neurocomputing journal</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">.</span></p><br><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(255,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">The conference is held in </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(255,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Bruges</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(255,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">, Belgium</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">. Bruges is one of the most beautiful medieval towns in Europe. Designated as the "Venice of the North", the city has preserved all the charms of the medieval heritage.</span></p><br><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">SPECIAL SESSION</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">: Language processing in the era of deep learning</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Organized by Ivano Lauriola (University of Padova, Italy; Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy), Alberto Lavelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy), Fabio Aiolli (University of Padova, Italy)</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence brimful of intricate, sophisticated, and challenging tasks, such as machine translation, question answering, summarization, and so on.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Thanks to the recent advances of deep learning, NLP applications have received an unprecedented boost in performance, generating growing interest from the machine learning community. However, even if deep learning techniques are starting to reach excellent performance on various tasks, there are still several problems that need to be solved, such as the computational cost, the reproducibility of results, and the lack of interpretability.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">This special session is devoted to cover novel research about popular and fashionable applications of machine learning and deep learning solutions to NLP tasks. Both theoretical analysis and empirical solutions to real-world problems are welcome and encouraged.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Relevant deep learning topics include, but are not limited to:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- word, sentence, and document embeddings</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- graph embeddings and knowledge bases</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- information extraction</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- named entity recognition and relation extraction</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- question answering</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- string kernels</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- encoding/decoding architectures</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- summarization</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- machine translation</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- document classification</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- sentiment analysis</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- efficient and interpretable models</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- ontologies and knowledge-driven approaches</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- resources, datasets, and pre-trained models</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- multidisciplinary applications (such as biomedical text mining, verbal lie detection...)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;text-align:justify;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- creative tasks (such as storytelling, caption generation, social media analytics, multilinguality…)</span></p><br><br><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Contacts:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- all questions concerning this Special Session may be sent by e-mail to </span><a href="mailto:ivano.lauriola@phd.unipd.it" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">ivano.lauriola@phd.unipd.it</span></a><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">- other general questions related to the ESANN 2020 conference may be sent by e-mail directly to the conference organizers: </span><a href="mailto:esann@uclouvain.be" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">esann@uclouvain.be</span></a></p><br><br><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Best regards,</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Ivano Lauriola</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">email: </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Georgia;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><a href="mailto:ivano.lauriola@phd.unipd.it" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line:none">ivano.lauriola@phd.unipd.it</a></span></p></div>