2021Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

SIGNLL Annual Report (2020-21)

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). We will hold elections for a new president and secretary in the fall of 2021.

CoNLL 2021

In 2021, the CoNLL conference is collocated with EMNLP, and will be held in a hybrid fashion: Online and in the Barceló Bávaro Convention Centre, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The program chairs are Arianna Bisazza (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) and Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel). The invited speakers are Jennifer Culbertson (The University of Edinburgh, UK) and Gary Lupyan (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 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 2021 received 211 submissions. Reviewing is currently underway.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CoNLL 2021 does not have any shared tasks. We expect to restart the tradition of shared tasks in 2022.