2020Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

SIGNLL Annual Report (2019-20)

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 tasks), and support of other related activities.

Our websites, located at URL http://www.signll.org for SIGNLL and at www.conll.org for CoNLL was maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Pieter Fivez until Mach 2021, and is now maintained by Jens Lemmens (also at U Antwerpen). This is complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events.

The current SIGNLL president is Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) and the secretary is Afra Alishahi (Tilburg University). 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, Xavier Carreras, Alexander Clark, Walter Daelemans, Lluis Marquez, Hwee Tou Ng, Joakim Nivre, David Powers, and Dan Roth; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://www.signll.org/officers for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards).

CoNLL 2020

In 2020, the CoNLL conference was virtual, and held in conjunction with EMNLP. The program chairs were Raquel Fernández (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Tal Linzen (New York University, USA). The invited speakers were Emmanuel Dupoux (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Facebook AI Research, Paris, France) and Kristina Toutanova (Google, USA). Starting in 2020, to differentiate itself from other NLP conferences, CoNLL adopted a focus on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications. CoNLL 2020 received 255 submissions, 227 of which were sent out for review. 53 papers were accepted for publication The shared task on "Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing" was organized by a team led by Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo). This task received eight submissions.