2012Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

ACL SIGNLL Annual Report (2011-2012)

The goals of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, are to promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural language. These are served by (i) the maintenance of an informative and up-to-date website and associated mailing list, and (ii) the organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared task), and support of other related activities.

The web-pages, located at URL http://www.aclweb.org/signll/ and maintained by Erik Tjong Kim Sang, remain an important source of information, complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events. On the web-site, links can be found to relevant associations, networks, research cooperations, research departments, groups, institutes, mailing lists, archives, journals, bulletins, conference reports, online papers (including all papers of all CoNLL proceedings), online courses and slides, bibliographies, software, corpora, companies, meta-information sources, etc.

An election was held to replace the outgoing president and secretary (Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden), secretary LluÌs M‡rquez (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain). The steering committee nominated two candidates who were duly elected: as of the new president is Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway, University of London) and the secretary is Xavier Carreras (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain).

Apart from the officers, SIGNLL also has two consultative committees. The SIGNLL Steering Committee, composed by all past SIGNLL officers: Antal van den Bosch, Claire Cardie, Walter Daelemans, Hwee Tou Ng, David Powers, and Dan Roth; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://ifarm.nl/signll/about/#officers, for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards). David Yarowsky acts as the SIGDAT Liaison Representative.

The current membership of SIGNLL is approximately 350 people.

EMNLP-CoNLL-2012

In 2012, the annual meeting of CoNLL will be a joint conference with EMNLP, the SIGDAT annual meeting, which is collocated with the ACL annual meeting in Jeju, South Korea. It will take place June 12-14, 2012.

There were 560 submissions of which 99 papers were accepted as talks and an additional 40 submissions were accepted as posters.

More information can be found on the conference website: http://emnlp-conll2012.unige.ch/

CoNLL-2012 Shared-task

As is usual, there is a shared task associated with CoNLL. The shared task was selected from a set of 4 proposals submitted to the SIGNLL call for shared tasks in September 2011. Information on the task can be found at http://conll.cemantix.org/2012/ The task was entitled 'Modeling Multilingual Unrestricted Coreference in OntoNotes' and was organised by Sameer Pradhan (Chair) Raytheon BBN Technologies, Alessandro Moschitti University of Trento, and Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University.

A total of 15 teams have participated in the shared task, which demonstrates its high interest in the community. As usual, the shared task papers will be collected into an accompanying volume of the EMNLP-CoNLL-2012 proceedings.

Other activities:

Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjecivity and Sentiment Analysis (WASSA 2012), taking place at ACL 2012 is endorsed by SIGNLL.