Instructions for submissions to the FSMNLP 2005 post-proceedings in Springer LNAI Series

The status of submissions: the submitted articles are waiting for processing.
Deadline
The deadline will be the end of November 2005. The deadline was extended to 5th December 2005 according to the call email.

Page limit

The page limit is

  • 1 - 18 pages for invited talks,
  • 12 pages for contributions accepted as regular papers,
  • 2 (at most 3) pages for contributions accepted as poster papers,
  • 2 pages for software demo abstracts.

Please do not be confused by the page numbers in the preproceedings. Regardless of the prior size of your article, you can extend you contribution within the limits.

If you follow the following instructions you willget a result where the PDF contains also the table of contents and the index of authors. They are not counted in to the total number of pages in the contribution.

Because Springer will use Computer Modern instead of Times Roman font family that we unfortunately advised to use earlier, the produced text may grow slightly when you follow the instructions below. We apologize for our wrong information.

Question: I'm confused. Are the posters papers invited to submit an extended version?
Answer: No, the page limit is still two pages for posters and demo abstracts. You do not have to write the second page if you do not like the idea of using all the available space.
Question: Will the posters be published in a separate volume?
Answer: The posters and demo abstracts will be only extended abstracts of two (at most 3) pages. Currently there is no reason to publish them in a separate volume.


Information Sources

These instructions are based on the following sources:

  1. Internet site: Information for LNCS Authors
  2. Author's Instructions for the Preparation of Camera-Ready Contributions to LNCS/LNAI Proceedings.
  3. Internet site: Information for Volume Editors
  4. LNCS: Volume Editor's Instructions
  5. Instructions borrowed from CIAA 2004, with later corrections by A. Okhotin (personal communication). CIAA is a comparable, highly relevant conference series that also uses LNCS.
  6. Our own experience on preparing the pre-proceedings of FSMNLP 2005.

Sending the package

You should send the material through email as an attachment document. Send the package to the address "fsmnlp(a)ling.helsinki.fi" and use as the Subject: "FSMNLP: PROCNNNN: submit" where NNNN is your paper ID. For example, the headers of my submission email looks like this:

To: fsmnlp(a)ling.helsinki.fi
Subject: FSMNLP: PROC9257: submit

Paper (invited, regular, posters, demos) ID code
Look up the identification code of your contribution from the following table:
OK
ID code Paper titleCopyright Form  Slides Cached
9001 Characterizations of Regularity OK
9002 Finnish Optimality-Theoretic Prosody
9003 Partitioning Multitape Transducers OKYES
9013 Squeezing the Infinite to Finite OK
9024 A Novel Approach to Computer-Assisted Translation based on Finite-State Transducers OK
9034 Finite-State Registered Automata and Their Uses in Natural Languages OKYES
9046 TAGH: A Comlete Morphology for German based on Weighted Finite-State Automata OKYES
9058 Klex: A Finite-State Transducer Lexicon of Korean OK
9069 Longest-Match Pattern Matching with Weighted Finite-State Automata OKYES
9077 Finite-State SyllabificationOK
9087 Algorithms for Minimum Risk ChunkingOK
9099 Collapsing $\epsilon$-Loops in Weighted Finite-State Machines ?
9109 WFSM Auto-intersection and Join Algorithms OKYES
9121 Further Results on Syntactic Ambiguity of Internal Contextual Grammars YES
9133 Error-Driven Learning with Bracketed Constraints OK
9145 Parsing with Lexicalized Probabilistic Recursive Transition Networks OKYES
9156 Integrating a POS Tagger and a Chunker Implemented as Weighted Finite State Machines OKYES
9168 Modelling the Semantics of Calendar Expressions as Extended Regular Expressions OK
9180 Using Finite State Technology in a Tool for Linguistic Exploration
9191 Applying a Finite Automata Acquisition Algorithm to Nambed Entity Recognition OK
9202 Principles, Implementation Strategies and Evaluation of a Corpus Query System OK
9214 On Compact Storage Models for Gazetteers OKYES
9226 German Compound Analysis with \textit{wfsc} OKYES
9234 Scaling an Irish FST Morphology Engine for Use on Unrestricted Text OKYES
9246 Improving Inter-letter Communication in Cascaded Finite-State Partial Parsers
9257 Pivotal Synchronization Expressions: A Formalism for Alignments in Regular String Relations ?YES
9269 A Complete FS Model for Amharic Morphographemics
9271 Tagging with Delayed Disambiguation OK
9273 A New Algorithm for Unsupervised Induction of Concatenative MorphologyOK
9275 Morphological Parsing of Tone: an Experiment with Two-Level Morphology on the Ha Language
9277 Describing Verbs in Disjoining Writing Systems
9280 An FST Grammar for Verb Chain Transfer in a Spanish-Basque MT System OK
9282 Finite-State Transducers Based on k-TSS Grammar for Speech TranslationOK
9285 Unsupervised Morphology Induction Using MorfessorOK
9286 SProUT - a General-Purpose NLP Framework Integrating Finite-State and Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms OK YES
9288 Tool Demonstration: Functional Morphology OK YES
9290 From Xerox to ASpell: A First Prototype of a North Sámi Speller Based on TWOL TechnologyOK
9292 A Programming Language for Finite State TransducersOK YES
9294 FIRE Station

These IDs are temporary and only to help us. When we deliver the material to Springer, each article will be given a new number in the range 0001 - 0350, reflecting the number of the first page of each article.

Sub-directory

For purposes of packaging, make a directory whose name is PROCNNNN where NNNN = your paper ID code and move the source files of your article to this directory.

Package Format

Send us the above directory as a tar or zip archive. When you compress the files, please do archiving so that the parent directory of the directory PROCNNNN is the root of the archive and the archive is named as PROCNNNN.tar.gz or PROCNNNN.zip, where NNNN is your paper ID code. We recommend the tar utility. With it you can create the archive with the commands

$ cd  PROCNNNN/
$ cd  ..
$ tar cvfz PROCNNNN.tar.gz PROCNNNN/

For example, I would personally do it as follows

$ cd  PROC9257/
$ cd  ..
$ tar cvfz PROC9257.tar.gz PROC9257/

The standard contents of the PROCNNNN directory

The submission should include the following standard parts that should be present in the PROCNNNN/ directory:

PROCNNNN/Makefilea Unix-style makefile (if you are using Windows, that's OK and then you do not have this)
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.texthe main file of your paper contains just a few lines that load the style definitions and the two parts of the article (the abstract and the body)
PROCNNNN/libthe directory containg all the non-standard LaTeX style packages

These files can be downloaded as a complete tar-archive from http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/events/FSMNLP2005/tex/fsmnlp-lib.tgz. Directory /tex/lib/ contains two versions of fsmnlp.tex that can be used if the tipe (phonetic IPA alphabet) or Hangul (Korean alphabet) are in use: fsmnlp-tipa.tex and fsmnlp-hangul.tex.

The main contents of the PROCNNNN directory

In addition to the standard parts, the submission should include the following parts that are unique to each contribution. These should be present in the PROCNNNN/ directory of the submitted package.

PROCNNNN/fsmnlp-abst.tex  the file containing the author and title definitions as well as the abstract
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp-body.texthe file containing the body of the article (the "body" starts after the abstract usually with the command \section{Introduction})
PROCNNNN/incthe directory containing ALL the files that are not figures but are included in the body of the document
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp-bibl.texthe file containing either a \bibliography{...} or \thebibliography{99} command. We recommend using the first method (remember to include the .BIB-files).
PROCNNNN/*.bibthe BIBTEX sources mentioned in fsmnlp-bibl.tex.
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp-appx.texthe file containing an optional appendix (will be printed after the bibliography) -- in most cases this file is empty.
PROCNNNN/imgthe directory containing ALL the EPS-figures as well as the source files of (gpic,) dot and Xfig figures, if any (this allows reproducing the corresponding EPS files if necessary to improve their quality)
PROCNNNN/*.bibthe BIBTEX sources mentioned in fsmnlp-bibl.tex.
Finally, the following automatically generated parts will be required:
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.bbl       the references file generated by the bibtex program.
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.dvithe DVI version of your contribution (PostScript figues need not be properly shown by xdvi — this is just for rebuilding the PostScript file, if needed.)
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.psthe PS version of your contribution
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.pdfthe PDF version of your contribution
PROCNNNN/fsmnlp.logthe log of the latest latex run.

Optional download: our current build directory of your paper

If you do not want to create the above directory structure from scratch or you do not understand what you should do, you can download a package that contains the required directory for your paper. This directory was created when we built your article for the pre-proceedings CD (for purposes of the official proceedings we changed the document style, though, so it can be used immediately as a basis for the revised version).

The secret download URL has been send to the authors by email.

Please download our version, extract it with "tar xfvz PRECNNNN.tgz" and try building the PDF file with make.

Generating the bibliography

When you say simply make this assumes that bibliography is static and contained in fsmnlp-bibl.tex. If you can provide the BIBTEX sources, please insert \bibliography{...} command to fsmnlp-bibl.tex and say make all.

Some strong requirements of Springer
Please observe the following important writing conventions of Springer LNCS:

  1. Figure captions should be under the figures and table captions above the tables!

  2. There is no period at the end of the caption!

  3. Headings (at least \title,\section,\subsection) should be Capitalized (i.e. Nouns, Verbs and all other Words except articles, prepositions and conjunctions). There is a special rule for words joinded with hyphen:

    Non-deterministic, Self-determinations, Multi-flip,
          but
    Finite-State, User-Friendly, Context-Freeness, etc.
    4. In other words, if the first part is also a standalone word then both parts are capitalized.

  4. You must use \label and \ref or \pageref rather than absolute numbers for cross-references.

  5. Note that the proceedings will use numbered citations, like [1,8,10-11], rather than fullname citations. We had to make some changes (in 9046,9168) when we prepared the pre-proceedings.

  6. There should be no overfull boxes in the document. Please check the .log file created by LaTeX for error messages of the following type:

    (source of this figure: A. Okhotin, CIAA 2004)

    To remove these errors, you should add hyphens or force break lines with \linebreak. It would be very good if there are also no underfull boxes, but removing them all is often more difficult.

  7. Do not use psfig or epsf for inclusion of EPS figures. Please use the epsfig package or/and the graphicx package instead. The epsfig is a uses the interface of psfig and techniques of epsf and makes them thus obsolete.

  8. Let the Makefile to make the bibliography with bibtex each time when you compile the PDF file. This implies that

    1. You do not write citation references directly into the text but you use the \cite command for references to the bibliography.

    2. You can provide us with the Bibtex source of the bibliography in order to allow us to modify the bibtex style and to create hyperlinks to these places.

  9. Make sure that you DO NOT use explicit formatting commands such as \vspace, \small, \scriptsize, \hspace, \baselinestrech.
    10. (source of this figure: CIAA 2004)

  10. If necessary, you can insert a pagebreak before a figure, but normally please define figures as floating objects if possible. The reason is that the text may condense expand if the publisher uses different fonts than the authors.

  11. In order to prevent hyphenation in the table of contents, use \protect\newline (instead of \\).

Font-related guidelines (for those who need special fonts)

  1. Do not try to expand the font capability of math mode with cmbright, sfmath or \DeclareMathAlphabet. The methods like these do not work properly as the maximum number of available math alphabets in TeX is amazingly only sixteen (this is a known LaTeX issue). Moreover, additional fonts have to be taken care of when PDF is generated, otherwise they are not safe in general. For example, the following is forbidden:

    \DeclareMathAlphabet{\mymathsfsl}{T1}{lmss}{m}{sl}
    \DeclareMathAlphabet{\mymathbfn}{T1}{lmr}{b}{n}
    \newcommand{\myalpha}[1]{\ensuremath{\mymathsfsl{#1}}}
    \newcommand{\myopname}[1]{\ensuremath{\mymathbfn{#1}}}

    A convenient and very generic way to add more fonts to the math mode is to embed a \text{}-box inside the math mode. In the box you can use all non-math fonts. For example, this method is good for using slanted sans-serif in the math mode.

    \newcommand{\mymathsfsl}[1]{\ensuremath{\text{\textsf{\textsl{#1}}}}} \newcommand{\myopname}[1]{\ensuremath{\text{\textbf{#1}}}}

  2. The llncs document class uses automatically Computer Modern Roman (CM) fonts. Other fonts for Roman, Sans-Serif and Courier font families would deviate from the LNCS style and their use is therefore discouraged (see LNCS Authors' Instructions, page 7). We apologize the incorrect information in earlier phases when we asked to use the times package. Thus, the forbidden text font packages should include at least

    courier, helvet, mathpazo, mathptmx, psfonts, pslatex, times.

  3. Please specify input encoding for all .TEX source files and the bibliography by adding command \inputencoding{yourenc} at least at the beginning of the fsmnlp-abst.tex. Unless you need a wider input encoding, you should use ascii as yourenc although this causes the warning: 
    Package inputenc Warning: No characters defined (inputenc)
by input encoding change to `ascii' (inputenc) on input line 1.

    If the default causes the compilation to fail at a certain file, this file contains a non-ASCII character and uses a different encoding. Determine then which encoding it is using. Then, change the default parameter value ascii in the above command into latin1 (papers 9145,9156,9191 ?), utf8 (papers 9003,9290 ?), cp850 (paper 9058) or ansinew (paper 9069) or something else according to the encoding you are using in each file.

    However, if you make use of Hangul symbols in you text, then you should not set any input encoding. Hangulj.sty defines its own input methods and it assumes that the input encoding is unset.

  4. If you use the tipa package to generate IPA fonts, please note that you need to copy lib/fsmnlp-tipa.tex onto fsmnlp.tex. Furthermore, you should observe that we reserve the following short commands for their original use and do not allow their redefinition by tipa.sty: \:, \;, \!, \*, \|. This is restriction is achieved with the \tipasafemode command after fsmnlp-tipa.tex have been declared.

Guidelines that help us to generate table of contents and the author index automatically

Table of contents and the author index of the proceedings can be compiled automatically if we can compile all the contributions together as a single LaTeX document. We know how to do this, but your co-operation can reduce our work. However, Springer will compile each contribution separately and they do not require these things.

  1. If you define commands etc. try to choose distinctive names for them (you can add, for example, you initials to the command names to make them more probably unique). Please refrain from defining LaTeX commands with very short names. The same applies to labels.

    (source of this figure: CIAA 2004)

    Note that you can prevent visibility of your definitions outside of a certain area by including the definitions of new commands inside a pair of curly brackets { ... }. Such brackets are, in fact, already employed in the fsmnlp.tex. In contrast to this, you cannot be completely sure that a certain command name has not been defined in a package that somebody else is using. Therefore, short names should be avoided.

    In the current contributions, there are at least two used packages that define active characters (very short command names): gb4e.sty and hangulj.sty, but they are acceptable. Problematic packages such as these can be used in fsmnlp-body as follows: 

    {
\makeatletter   % allows @ in commands
  \input{lib/hangulj.more}
  \input{lib/gb4e.sty}
\makeatother    % does not allow @ in commands
\section{Introduction}
The body of your contribution....
}
    Here the role of \makeatletter and \makeatother is to allow more complex command names, typical for style packages internals. Unfortunately, this method does not allow inclusion of many latex styles, as they have to be included in the preamble.

  2. LaTeX internal commands must not be redefined, i.e.

    (source of this figure: CIAA 2004)

  3. All new LaTeX commands defined in the paper should be used somewhere. Please remove the definitions of all unused commands.

Quality-check the figures

Check that the EPS figures are of high quality. It is true that screenshots and camera pictures are pixel graphics and have limited resolution. However, most of the illustrations in the articles are drawings. Drawing can be made with a tool that uses vector graphics, and we encourage you to ensure that the way you produce EPS does not reduce the quality by converting vector graphics into pixel graphics.

To check the quality of your drawings, open the final PDF file with AcroReader. Then, manify the page on the screen to some 3200% of the original size. If your drawings look perfect even at this resolution you can be faily sure that they make use of the vector graphics capability of the PostScript language. In some cases, you may have to re-draw the figures with a better tool, although the effort spent on producing perfect pictures should be kept within reasonable limits.

We recommend the following tools for the best drawing quality:

  • PSTricks and Vaucanson-G (these are LaTeX packages),
  • gpic -t (this creates TeX commands that draw figures),
  • Xfig (This can produce many formats, including PDF,EPS etc.),
  • Graphvitz/dot (this produces PS images).

It is recommended that the author's include the sources of every drawing as well as the instructions (e.g. a Makefile target) into the submitted package of files. The sources should be stored to the PROCNNNN/img-src directory.

Remember that in the printed proceedings, the colors will not be implemented. Colors are, however, allowed in figures. Minimize shading as contrasts between various gray scale values may be difficult to reproduce.

Final check

Before you send the package to us, we ask you to check that you have verified the following items:

  • If you are using UNIX, please check that the desired PDF document can be created with make command in the PROCNNNN directory as follows (wieving the result with acroread is not required though):
    $ cd PROCNNNN/
    $ make clean
    $ make
    $ acroread fsmnlp.pdf

  • Check that the PDF document looks what you want.

  • Check that the produced fonts in text and in mathematic formalas are of high resolution in the PDF. Sometimes your system does not support exactly the fonts you are using TeX substitutes them with something else. In such cases, the pagination and line breaks of your PDF may differ from the PDF procuded by the publisher.

  • Check that the page count is within the limit of 12 pages. You are not allowed to use direct formatting commands to squeeze the pages. Rather, if your article is too long, you should remove some material.

  • Read "Authors'Instructions for the preparation of camera-ready contributions to LNCS/LNAI Proceedings" in case that there are some relevant points that we have not mentioned here.

  • All the files in the directory PROCNNNN should be related to the official version of this paper. Please remove files related to older versions or to other articles, but keep the directory functional (test the cleaned directory with make).

  • Please do not confuse us by sending more than one PDF file at a time, unless you resend everything. We assume that the PDF file is built from the sources in the same directory.

The copyright form

A signed copyright form is required for each article. In the table of articles above, we have marked with "OK" all those papers for which we have already received a signed copyright form.

You can download (PDF, 10Kb) the copyright forms from Springer and print it. Note that Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) is a derivative of the concept of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Therefore the form is imprecisely entitled "Lecture Notes in Computer Science Copyright Form", but do not worry about this.

One of the authors signs for and accepts responsibility for releasing the material on behalf of any and all co-authors. Please make sure that the signed forms reach us by 10th December. You can use one of the following methods:

  1. through fax to +358(9)19129307, or
  2. via snail mail to the address:
    Dr. Anssi Yli-Jyrä
    Department of General Linguistics
    P.O. Box 9
    FIN-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
    FINLAND, EUROPE
  3. If you send the form via surface mail, please notify us (fsmnlp(a)ling.helsinki.fi) when the envelope is on the way.

Question: What we are supposed to fill inthe blanks related to the "Conference/Book" and "Volume Editor" that are required in the copyright form?
Answer: You can use the name of the conference "FSMNLP 2005" or alternatively the tentative book name "Proceedings of the FSMNLP 2005". The volume editors include Lauri Karttunen, Juhani Karhumäki, and Anssi Yli-Jyrä (the final order does not matter in the Copyright form).

The address of the receiver of the printed proceedings

We are going to send a printed copy of the official proceedings in the Springer LNAI to all its authors who attended the conference.

Please inform us on the postal address of the receiver(s) of the printed proceedings. We realize that the OpenConf server provides only very incomplete information and the registeration of conference participants did not require this information.

Optional: Supplementary material

If you want to provide supplementary material (e.g. presentation slides or demonstration), we will add links to them. Springer is also interested to add links to the supplementary material (you will still have the copyright).

There are two methods for providing the link:

  1. You can just provide an URL if you want to keep the material on your server and you are quite sure that the URL will stay available in the future.
  2. You give us your written consent for online publication of the slides at the FSMNLP 2005 site. An email message is enough for this purpose.

You should also provide the material and a short description of it. The slides in PDF or PPT format might still exist on our conference laptop (denoted with "YES" in the "Slides Cached" column in the prior table of articles), if you want us to collect them for this purpose.

What happens after the submission of the revised version?

  1. We will check the contents and quality of each package and deliver them to the Springer LNAI editors (in December).
  2. We get the volume number of the proceedings and we will insert the bibliographical information of the forthcoming volume to the home page of FSMNLP 2005 (in December).
  3. The LNAI editors will enter into your source files in order to insert running heads, a reference line, final page numbers and to correct any formatting or capitalization discrepancies (they will use llncs.cls but you can get the intended result by with llncs-fsmnlp-final.cls which also inserts the running heads and prelimary information in order to get similar draft).
  4. You will get by email Springer's final version of the paper and you can check whether the layout and typesetting are correct. Please note that at this point Springer LNAI editors will only correct errors that have been introduced during the publication process.
  5. The offical proceedings will be ready within 10 weeks from the day when we delivered them to LNAI editors. You will be notified and the link to the proceedings will be inserted to the FSMNLP 2005 home page.

Other questions and answers by the authors

Question: By the way, are the pictures that you took during the conference available on-line? Thank you.
Answer: They are on the way to web, but it will still take time, unfortunately, to prepare a selection of those. But we will tell all the participants when we are ready.

Last modified: Mon Dec 19 18:32:46 EET 2005