2014Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

ACL SIGNLL Annual Report (2013-2014)

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 Ben Verhoeven, 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. On December 2013 SIGNLL bought two web domains for a 10 year period, for the SIGNLL and CoNLL websites, respectively: www.signll.org and www.conll.org.

The current president is Alexander Clark (King's College, 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-2014

In 2014, 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 Scott Wen-Tau Yih (Microsoft Research) and Roser Morante (Antwerp). The conference received 90 submissions, of which 7 were eventually withdrawn, and accepted 20 of the remaining 83 papers. The invited speakers were Morten Christiansen and Tom Mitchell. More information can be found on the conference website: http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/conll/

CoNLL-2014 Shared-task

As in previous years, CoNLL-2014 hosts a high-profile NLP shared task, Grammatical Error Correction, a continuation of the shared task in 2013. Papers of the shared task are collected in a companion volume of the CoNLL-2014 proceedings.