2010Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

ACL SIGNLL Annual Report (2009-2010) by Joakim Nivre and Lluís Màrquez

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.

Currently, SIGNLL has 326 members, with ~22 new registrations in 2009. An election for SIGNLL officers was organized after the summer of 2009. New president is Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden) and secretary Lluís Màrquez (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain). The current office period runs from November 1, 2009 to October 31, 2011. Our Information Officer remains Erik Tjong Kim Sang.

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.

Main activities during the 2009-2010 period

• CoNLL 2010

 The Fourteenth SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language
 Learning, CoNLL-2010, will be held in Uppsala, Sweden, 15-16 July
 2010, in conjunction with ACL 2010. Program co-chairs are Anoop
 Sarkar and Mirella Lapata. The special topic of interest of the 2010
 edition is Grammar Induction, including varied perspectives (machine
 learning, natural language engineering and cognitive approaches) and
 aiming at integrating works form several areas of research
 (statistical methods, pattern recognition, neural networks,
 computational linguistics, computational learning theory, automata
 theory, and language acquisition).

 CoNLL 2010 received 99 submissions, of which 18 were eventually
 withdrawn. Of the remaining 81 papers, 12 were selected to appear in
 the conference programme as oral presentations, and 13 were chosen
 as posters.  The invited speakers are Lillian Lee (Cornell
 University) and Zoubin Gharamani (University of Cambridge) and their
 talks will cover knowledge-lean information extraction and Bayesian
 HMMs, respectively.

 As in 2009, the CoNLL-2010 best paper award is sponsored by
 Google. More information can be found at the conference website
 http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll2010/

• CoNLL-2010 Shared Task As in previous years, CoNLL-2010 has a shared

 task, "Learning to detect hedges and their scope in natural language
 text". The shared task is completely new and was selected from a set
 of 4 proposals submitted to the SIGNLL call for shared tasks in
 September 2009.  It addresses the detection of uncertainty in two
 domains, using the BioScope corpus (biological scientific articles)
 and the public Wikipedia weasel annotations. Two uncertainty
 detection tasks were proposed: 1) detecting sentences containing
 uncertainty, and 2) resolving the in-sentence scope of hedge cues.
 A total of 23 teams have participated in the shared task, which can
 be considered a real success, given the novelty of the topic. Those
 who participated in both tasks were invited to write a 8 page
 paper. The page limit for those who participated only in the first
 task was 6 pages. The Shared Task papers are collected into an
 accompanying volume of CoNLL- 2010.

 The task maintains its own website where all the details (including
 datasets and results) can be found:
 http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/rgai/conll2010st

• SIGNLL is also endorsing the Workshop "Negation and Speculation in

 Natural Language Processing (NeSpNLP 2010)", organized by Roser
 Morante and Caroline Sporleder. The workshop will be held next July
 in Uppsala, just before the ACL 2010 events. Workshop website
 http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/NeSpNLP2010/index.html

• In July-August 2010, SIGNLL will launch a call for shared task

 proposals to select the task to be run in CoNLL-2011. A designated
 committee will judge the submitted proposals and declare the
 selected task no later than October 2010.