2016Q3 Reports: SIGNLL
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 organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared task); (ii) support of other related activities; and (iii) the maintenance of informative websites (http://www.signll.org, http://www.conll.org) and a mailing list.
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). The information officers are Erik Tjong Kim Sang (University of Groningen) and Ben Verhoeven (University of Antwerp). 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 335 people. This count went down from 350 members in 2015; this is because we removed members whose contact information is not valid anymore.
This autumn, on November 1, the terms of the current SIGNLL officers will end. This summer we will run elections, and on June 27, 2016 we started the process to determine nominees. The SIGNLL Steering Committee has proposed Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) as president and Suzanne Stevenson (University of Toronto) as secretary. SIGNLL members can propose nominees until August 31.
CoNLL-2016
In 2016, the annual meeting of CoNLL is co-located with the ACL annual meeting in Berlin, Germany. It will take place August 11-12, 2016. The conference chairs are Yoav Goldberg (Bar Ilan University) and Stefan Riezler (Heidelberg University). The invited speakers are Jürgen Schmidhuber (IDSIA) and Fernanda Ferreira (UC Davis). More information can be found on the conference website: http://www.conll.org/2016.
As in previous years, CoNLL-2016 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-2016 proceedings. As in 2015, 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.
CoNLL-2017
We have decided to co-locate CoNLL-2017 with ACL in Vancouver (from 30 July to August 4, 2017). A call for proposals for the CoNLL-2017 Shared Task was issued on July 20, 2016.