2015Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

ACL SIGNLL Annual Report (2014-2015)

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 website, located at URL http://www.signll.org and maintained by Ben Verhoeven, has recently been updated, and remains an important source of information. This is complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events, managed by Erik Tjong Kim Sang. On the website, 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. In addition, SIGNLL maintains the domain www.conll.org for specific information about CoNLL conferences.

As of November 1 2014 the president is Xavier Carreras (Xerox Research Centre Europe) and the secretary is Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign). 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, 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://ifarm.nl/signll/about/#officers, for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards).

The current membership of SIGNLL is approximately 350 people.

CoNLL-2015

In 2015, the annual meeting of CoNLL is collocated with the ACL annual meeting in Baltimore, MA. It will take place June 26-27, 2014. The conference chairs are Afra Alishahi (Tilburg University) and Alessandro Moschitti (Qatar Computing Research Institute). As a novelty, this year the conference accepted short papers, in addition to long ones. The conference received 144 submissions (81 long, 61 short), of which 17 were eventually withdrawn, and accepted a total of 38 papers (29 long, 9 short). The invited speakers are Paul Smolensky (Johns Hopkins University) and Eric Xing (Carnegie Mellon University). More information can be found on the conference website: http://www.conll.org/2015

CoNLL-2015 Shared-task

As in previous years, CoNLL-2015 hosts a high-profile NLP shared task, Shallow Discourse Parsing, a new task in the CoNLL shared task series. Nianwen Xue (Brandeis University) is the chair of the organized committee. Papers of the shared task are collected in a companion volume of the CoNLL-2015 proceedings.

As a main novelty, this year the shared task evaluations have been performed on the TIRA platform from the University of Weimar, managed by Martin Potthast. TIRA allows participants to upload their systems and evaluate them automatically. One of the main advantages of this approach is that the evaluation sets remain confidential.