2022Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

SIGNLL Annual Report (2021-22)

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 were 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 2022

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.

In 2022, the CoNLL conference was collocated with EMNLP 2022 in Abu Dhabi, and was held in a hybrid format but also entirely accessible online. The program chairs were Antske Fokkens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Vivek Srikumar (University of Utah, USA). The publicity Chair was Jack Hessel (Allen Institute for AI), and the publication Chair was R. Thomas McCoy (John Hopkins University). Pia Sommerauer and Angel Daza acted as local chairs. The invited speakers were Noah Goodman (Stanford University) and Allyson Ettinger (University of Chicago). CoNLL 2022 did not have any shared tasks.