CoNLL-2013 Shared Task: Grammatical Error Correction
CoNLL-2013 will continue the CoNLL tradition of having a high profile
shared task in natural language processing. This year's shared task
will be grammatical error correction. A participating system in this
shared task is given short English texts written by non-native
speakers of English. The system detects the grammatical errors present
in the input texts, and returns the corrected texts.
This task has gained popularity recently with the organization of the
HOO (Helping Our Own) shared tasks in 2011 and 2012. In the most
recent HOO shared task in 2012, on error detection and correction of
determiners and prepositions, 14 teams from around the world
participated and 85 systems were submitted to the shared task.
The grammatical error correction task is impactful since it is
estimated that hundreds of millions of people in the world are
learning English and they benefit directly from an automated grammar
checker. However, for many error types, current grammatical error
correction methods do not achieve a high performance and thus more
research is needed.
Instead of focusing on only determiner and preposition errors as in
HOO 2012, the CoNLL-2013 shared task will include a more comprehensive
list of error types, including determiner, preposition, noun number,
verb form, agreement, spelling, and punctuation errors. Extending into
more error types introduces the possibility of correcting multiple
interacting errors. Examples of such interacting errors include
determiner and noun number ('that cars' -> 'that car' or 'those cars')
and preposition and verb form ('an interest to study' -> 'an interest
in studying').
Participating teams will be provided with common training data in
which grammatical errors have been annotated. Blind test data will be
used to evaluate the outputs of the participating teams using a common
scoring software and evaluation metric.
The shared task home page is accessible at:
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~nlp/conll13st.html
Registration (NEW)
Registration for the shared task has begun. Please email the following
information to conll13st [at] gmail.com: name, email address, and
affiliation of the members of a participating team, with one team
member designated as the contact person. Upon registration, each
participating team will receive the training data and scorer and join
a discussion group for the shared task. A signed license agreement is
needed for receipt of the training data. A team can register at
anytime before the registration deadline, but early registration is
highly encouraged, since details of the shared task will be announced
on the discussion group.
Important Dates
December 17, 2012: announcement of shared task
January 17, 2013: set up of shared task website
February 5, 2013: registration begins and release of training set and scorer
March 5, 2013: registration deadline
April 28, 2013: test set available
May 1, 2013: systems' outputs collected
May 8, 2013: system results due to participants
May 15, 2013: shared task system papers due
May 24, 2013: reviews due
May 27, 2013: notification of acceptance
June 3, 2013: camera ready version of shared task system papers due
August 8-9, 2013: CoNLL-2013 conference
Shared Task Organizers
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
Christian Hadiwinoto, National University of Singapore
Contact
Questions about the CoNLL-2013 shared task can be sent to conll13st [at] gmail.com.