CoNLL is the yearly conference organized by SIGNLL (the ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning). Previous CoNLL meetings were held in Madrid (1997), Sydney (1998), Bergen (1999), Lisbon (2000), Toulouse (2001), Taipei (2002), Edmonton (2003), Boston (2004), Ann Arbor (2005), New York (2006) and Prague (2007). This year, 2008, CoNLL will be collocated with COLING in Manchester, UK.
See http://ifarm.nl/signll/ and http://ifarm.nl/signll/conll/ for more information about SIGNLL and CoNLL. The official Web site of CoNLL-2008 can be found at http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll2008/
CoNLL is an international conference for research on natural language learning. We invite submission of papers about natural language learning topics, including, but not limited to:
* Computational models of human language acquisition
* Computational models of the evolution of language
* Machine learning methods applied to natural language
processing tasks (speech processing, phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics, discourse processing, language
engineering applications)
* Statistical methods (Bayesian learning, graphical models,
kernel methods, statistical models for structured problems)
* Symbolic learning methods (rule induction and decision
tree learning, lazy learning, inductive logic programming,
analytical learning, transformation-based error-driven learning)
* Biologically-inspired methods (Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing)
* Reinforcement learning
* Active learning, ensemble methods, meta-learning
* Learning architectures for structural and relational NLP tasks
* Computational learning theory analysis of language learning
* Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods
* Models of induction and analogy in linguistics
Special Topic of Interest -------------------------
This year we wish to encourage the submission of papers on models that explain natural phenomena relating to human language. This has two strands.
The first concerns the central scientific problem addressed by CoNLL: the study of first language acquisition. The only systems that we know of that can process language accurately are humans; the acquisition of their first language by infant children is one of the central problems of cognitive science. We invite papers that address this problem using computational models; including papers that address purely linguistic aspects of the problem, papers that model psycholinguistic data, or papers that apply learning theoretic analysis to language acquisition.
The second theme is the central engineering problem: how to build systems that do something useful: we are interested in complete systems that solve real problems. Thus we particularly invite papers that are evaluated on naturally occurring annotations, such as machine translation, language modelling, or question answering. We are also interested in work that evaluates the contribution of components which predict linguist-defined intermediate structure such as part-of-speech tags, semantic roles, or syntactic analyses to the performance of real systems. Important issues such work might study are the correlation of the component's performance on the sub-task with its impact on the end system performance and alternative architectures for incorporating predictions from different components.
Shared Task: ------------
The shared task for this CoNLL is "Joint Parsing of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies".
The task proposes the merging of both syntactic dependencies (extracted from the Penn Treebank ) and semantic dependencies (extracted both from PropBank and NomBank) under a unique unified representation. The task has several novel objectives:
1. The first objective, performing Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) on
a dependency-based representation, is to our knowledge novel.
Furthermore, the SRL problem will address not only propositions
centered around verbal predicates but also around nouns. 2. The syntactic dependencies to be modeled will be more complex than
the ones used in the previous CoNLL evaluations: Johansson and Nugues
have shown that a richer set of syntactic dependencies improves
semantic processing (Johansson & Nugues 2007). 3. The proposed evaluation offers a practical framework to perform
joint learning for the two problems.
Organised by
Mihai Surdeanu Richard Johansson Lluis Marquez Adam Meyers Joakim Nivre
The organisers can be contacted at conll08st at lsi.upc.edu A detailed description is available at http://www.yr-bcn.es/conll2008/
Invited Speakers ---------------- (to be announced)
Main Session Submissions ------------------------
A paper submitted to CoNLL-2008 must describe original, unpublished work. Submit a full paper of no more than 8 pages in PDF format by April 28 2008, electronically through a web form at http://www.softconf.com. (Please check back for exact URL).
Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of the Coling 2008 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. Papers must conform to the official Coling 2008 style guidelines. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program co-chairs.
Since reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations, and there should be no self-references that reveal the authors' identity. In the submission form, you will be asked for the following information: paper title, authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses, contact author's email address, a list of keywords, abstract, and an indication of whether the paper has been simultaneously submitted to other conferences (and if so which conferences). The contact author of an accepted paper under multiple submissions should inform the program co-chairs immediately whether he or she intends the accepted paper to appear in CoNLL-2008. A paper that appears in CoNLL-2008 must be withdrawn from other conferences.
Authors of accepted submissions are to produce a final paper to be published in the proceedings of the conference, which will be available at the conference for participants, and distributed afterwards by ACL. Final papers must follow the Coling 2008 style and are due 1 July, 2008.
Shared Task Submissions ----------------------- See the shared task web page (http://www.yr-bcn.es/conll2008/) for updated information.
Important Dates ---------------
Paper submission deadline: 28 April 2008 Notification of acceptance of papers: 6 June 2008 Deadline for camera-ready papers: 1 July 2008 Conference: August 16-17, 2008
Conference Organizers --------------------- Alex Clark Department of Computer Science Royal Holloway, University of London alexc (at) cs.rhul.ac.uk
Kristina Toutanova Microsoft Research kristout (at) microsoft.com
Shared Task Organizers ---------------------- Mihai Surdeanu Richard Johansson Lluis Marquez Adam Meyers Joakim Nivre
Information Officer ------------------- Erik Tjong Kim Sang University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) erikt (at) science.uva.nl
Program Committee
* Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country, Spain
* Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
* Roberto Basili, University of Roma, Tor Vergata, Italy
* Thorsten Brants, Google Inc, USA
* Paula Buttery, Cambridge University, UK
* Xavier Carreras, Polytechnical University of Catalunya, Spain
* Eugene Charniak, Brown University, USA
* Nick Chater, University College London, UK
* Ciprian Chelba, Google Inc, USA
* Colin Cherry, Microsoft Research, USA
* Stephen Clark, Oxford University, UK
* James Cussens, University of York, UK
* Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
* Hal Daume III, University of Utah, USA
* Radu Florian, IBM, USA
* Dayne Freitag, Fair Isaac Corporation, USA
* Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research, USA
* Daniel Gildea, University of Rochester, USA
* Marti Hearst, SIMS, UC Berkeley, USA
* Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Anna Korhonen, Cambridge University, UK
* Shalom Lappin, King's College, London, UK
* Roger Levy, UC San Diego, USA
* Rob Malouf, San Diego State University, USA
* Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
* Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
* Alessandro Moschitti, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
* John Nerbonne, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
* Hwee-Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* Franz Josef Och, Google, Inc., USA
* Miles Osborne, University of Edinburgh, UK
* David Powers, Flinders University, Australia
* Chris Quirk, Microsoft Research, USA
* Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA
* Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
* William Sakas, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
* Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, Canada
* Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada
* Richard Sproat, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Mihai Surdeanu, Polytechnical University of Catalunya, Spain
* Charles Sutton, UC Berkeley, USA
* Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
* Dekai Wu, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Hong Kong
* Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA