2013Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

ACL SIGNLL Annual Report (2012-2013)

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.

The current president is Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway, University of London) and the secretary is Xavier Carreras (LIS, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya). 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.

CoNLL-2013

In 2013, the annual meeting of CoNLL is collocated with the ACL annual meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria. It will take place August 8th-9th 2013. The conference chairs are Julia Hockenmaier (UIUC) and Sebastian Riedel (UCL). There were 100 submissions, excluding those which were automatically rejected or later withdrawn of which 25 papers were accepted.

More information can be found on the conference website: http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/conll/

CoNLL-2013 Shared-task

As is usual, there is a shared task associated with CoNLL.

Information on the task can be found at http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~nlp/conll13st.html.

The task was entitled 'Grammatical Error Correction' and was organised by

   Hwee Tou Ng (Chair), National University of Singapore
   Joel Tetreault, Nuance Communications
   Siew Mei Wu, National University of Singapore
   Yuanbin Wu, National University of Singapore and
   Christian Hadiwinoto, National University of Singapore.