====================================================================== CoNLL-2010 Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Uppsala, Sweden July 15-16, 2010 http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll/ ====================================================================== Call for Papers ====================================================================== CoNLL is the yearly international conference on natural language learning organized by SIGNLL (the ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning). This year, CoNLL will be collocated with ACL 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden. Important Dates --------------- * Paper submission deadline: March 8, 2010, 23:59 PST (GMT-8) * Notification of acceptance: April 22 (changed by two days on 4/20) * Camera-ready copy deadline: May 9 * Conference: July 15-16 Also, please note that ACL is providing a mentoring service. The section "Mentoring Service" in this CFP provides further details. For CoNLL-2010, the deadline to take advantage of the mentoring service is January 25, 2010. Topics ------ We invite submission of papers about natural language learning topics including: * Supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods applied to natural language * Computational models of human language acquisition and processing * Optimisation methods and inference algorithms for natural language * Active learning for natural language processing tasks * Computational learning theory analysis of language learning * Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods including novel evaluation methods * Computational models of language evolution and historical change * Algorithms for grammatical inference applied to natural language See http://ifarm.nl/signll/ and http://ifarm.nl/signll/conll/ for more information about SIGNLL and CoNLL. Invited Speakers ---------------- * Lillian Lee (Cornell University) * Zoubin Gharamani (University of Cambridge) Special Topic of Interest ------------------------- This year in CoNLL-2010 the special topic of interest is: Grammar induction We encourage submissions on papers relating to grammar induction, from a machine learning, natural language engineering and cognitive perspective. We wish to bring together researchers working on varying aspects of grammar learning in a number of different areas including statistical methods, pattern recognition, neural networks, computational linguistics, computational learning theory, automata theory, and language acquisition. Specifically, we encourage submissions of papers addressing: * Different models of grammar induction: e.g., learning from examples, learning using examples and queries, incremental versus non-incremental learning, distribution-free models of learning, learning under various distributional assumptions, learning from single versus multiple languages, learning synchronous grammars. * Different settings for grammar induction: unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches to grammar induction; supervised learning augmented by grammar induction techniques, e.g. state splitting using latent grammar symbols. Online learning, bootstrapping approaches, and Bayesian approaches to grammar induction * Theoretical results in grammar induction of formal languages with application to natural language learning: e.g., impossibility results, complexity results, characterizations of representational and search biases of grammar induction algorithms. * Cognitive models of grammar induction: e.g., models that faithfully represent the cognitive operations involved in human language acquisition or models that help explain facts about grammar acquisition (e.g., poverty of the stimulus). * Empirical comparison of different approaches to grammar induction. * Demonstrated or potential applications of grammar induction in natural language processing, machine translation, dialogue systems, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, adaptive intelligent agents, and other domains. Best Paper Award ---------------- As in previous CoNLL conferences, a Best Paper Award will be given to the authors of the highest quality paper. The most important aspects in judging the quality of a paper for this award will be: originality, innovativeness, relevance, and impact of the presented research. Main Session Submission Details ------------------------------- A paper submitted to CoNLL-2010 must describe original, unpublished work. Submit a full paper by March 8 2009, 23:59 PST (GMT-8). Papers must have at most 8 pages of content, plus any number of pages that contain references. Submission must be done electronically through the web form at: https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/acl2010conll/ We require the use of the ACL 2010 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. Papers must conform to the official ACL 2010 style guidelines. Authors who are unable to use these style files or submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program co-chairs. Please refer to the Formatting Instructions and ACL 2010 Style Files sections only on the following web page: http://acl2010.org/authors.html 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-2010. A paper that appears in CoNLL-2010 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 also follow the ACL 2010 style and should have at most 8 pages of content plus extra pages for references only. The camera ready submission deadline is listed above. At least one author is expected to register for the conference and present the paper. Please do not submit a paper if you do not plan to attend the conference. As in previous years, CoNLL-2010 will include a shared task which is organized by a separate committee. The details of the shared task are included in this CFP (see below). Please note the different submission details and deadlines for the shared task. Conference Chairs ----------------- Anoop Sarkar School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University anoop (at) cs.sfu.ca Mirella Lapata School of Informatics University of Edinburgh mlap (at) inf.ed.ac.uk Programme Committee ------------------- Steven Abney (University of Michigan, United States) Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country, Spain) Afra Alishahi (Saarland University, Germany) Jason Baldridge (The University of Texas at Austin, United States) Tim Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) Regina Barzilay (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States) Phil Blunsom (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) Thorsten Brants (Google Inc., United States) Chris Brew (Ohio State University, United States) Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe, France) Yunbo Cao (Microsoft Research Asia, China) Xavier Carreras (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain) Ming-Wei Chang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States) Colin Cherry (National Research Council, Canada) Massimiliano Ciaramita (Google Research, Switzerland) Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom) James Clarke (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States) Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Netherlands) Vera Demberg (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Amit Dubey (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Chris Dyer (Carnegie Mellon University, United States) Jenny Finkel (Stanford University, United States) Radu Florian (IBM Watson Research Center, United States) Robert Frank (Yale University, United States) Michel Galley (Stanford University, United States) Yoav Goldberg (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel) Cyril Goutte (National Research Council, Canada) Gholamreza Haffari (University of British Columbia, Canada) Keith Hall (Google Research, Switzerland) Marti Hearst (University of California at Berkeley, United States) James Henderson (University of Geneva, Switzerland) Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States) Fei Huang (IBM Research, United States) Rebecca Hwa (University of Pittsburgh, United States) Richard Johansson (University of Trento, Italy) Mark Johnson (Macquarie University, Australia) Rohit Kate (The University of Texas at Austin, United States) Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Terry Koo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States) Shankar Kumar (Google Inc., United States) Shalom Lappin (Kings College London, United Kingdom) Adam Lopez (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Rob Malouf (San Diego State University, United States) Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan) Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Tokyo, Japan) Ryan McDonald (Google Inc., United States) Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland) Haitao Mi (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) Yusuke Miyao (University of Tokyo, Japan) Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, United States) Alessandro Moschitti (University of Trento, Italy) Gabriele Musillo (FBK-IRST, Italy) Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom) Hwee Tou Ng (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Vincent Ng (University of Texas at Dallas, United States) Grace Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China) Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden) Franz Och (Google Inc., United States) Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Christopher Parisien (University of Toronto, Canada) Slav Petrov (Google Research, United States) Hoifung Poon (University of Washington, United States) David Powers (Flinders University of South Australia, Australia) Vasin Punyakanok (BBN Technologies, United States) Chris Quirk (Microsoft Research, United States) Lev Ratinov (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States) Roi Reichart (The Hebrew University, Israel) Sebastian Riedel (University of Massachusetts, United States) Ellen Riloff (University of Utah, United States) Brian Roark (Oregon Health & Science University, United States) Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States) William Sakas (Hunter College, United States) William Schuler (The Ohio State University, United States) Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany) Libin Shen (BBN Technologies, United States) Benjamin Snyder (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States) Richard Sproat (Oregon Health & Science University, United States) Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Jun Suzuki (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan) Hiroya Takamura (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) Ivan Titov (Saarland University, Germany) Kristina Toutanova (Microsoft Research, United States) Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, Netherlands) Peng Xu (Google Inc., United States) Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania, United States) Daniel Zeman (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington at Seattle, United States) Shared Task ----------- "Learning to detect hedges and their scope in natural language texts" In Natural Language Processing (NLP) - in particular, in Information Extraction (IE) - many applications aim at extracting factual information from text. In order to distinguish facts from unreliable or uncertain information, linguistic devices such as hedges (indicating that authors do not or cannot back up their opinions/statements with facts) have to be identified. Applications should handle detected speculative parts in a different manner. Hedge detection has received considerable interest recently in the biomedical NLP community, including research papers addressing the detection of hedge devices in biomedical texts, and some recent work on detecting the in-sentence scope of hedge cues in text. Exploiting the hedge scope annotated BioScope corpus and publicly available Wikipedia texts, the goals of the Shared Task are 1) learning to detect hedge cues in natural language texts and 2) learning to resolve the in-sentence scope of hedge cues. The task is described in detail in its own Call for Participation at http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/rgai/conll2010st Shared Task contact email: rfarkas (at) inf.u-szeged.hu (Richard Farkas, University of Szeged) Shared Task tentative dates and deadlines: * January 11, 2010: release of trial datasets and scorer; * January 18, 2010: registration for the task opens; * February 1, 2010: training and development sets available; * March 28, 2010: test set available; * April 2, 2010: systems' outputs collected; * April 18, 2010: deadline for system paper submission; * May 2, 2010: notification of acceptance; * May 9: deadline for camera ready paper submission. Shared Task Submissions ----------------------- See the shared task web page for detailed instructions at http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/rgai/conll2010st Shared Task Organizers ---------------------- Richard Farkas, Human Language Technology Group, University of Szeged (rfarkas at inf.u-szeged.hu) Organizers: * Veronika Vincze, Human Language Technology Group, University of Szeged (vinczev at inf.u-szeged.hu) * Gyorgy Szarvas, Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab, Technische Universitaat Darmstadt (szarvas at tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de) * Gyorgy Mora, Human Language Technology Group, University of Szeged (gymora at inf.u-szeged.hu) * Janos Csirik, Research Group of Artificial Intelligence, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (csirik at inf.u-szeged.hu) Mentoring Service ----------------- ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to read the scientific literature in English, have little or no experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the ACL meetings. Mentors can help by providing feedback to such authors. Mentoring Service Chairs Björn Gambäck (SICS, Sweden and NTNU, Norway) and Diana McCarthy (Lexical Computing Ltd., UK) are organizing this service for ACL 2010. If you would like to take advantage of the service for a submission to CoNLL, please upload your paper in PDF format using the paper submission software for the mentoring service available at: https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/acl2010mentor/ The deadline for the mentoring service is six weeks before the submission deadline, so for CoNLL-2010 the mentoring deadline is January 25th 2010. An appropriate mentor will be assigned to your paper and the mentor will get back to you no later than two weeks before the CoNLL submission deadline. Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to improve the technical content of their papers. Questions about the mentoring service should be referred to mentoring@acl2010.org. Information Officer ------------------- Erik Tjong Kim Sang University of Groningen (The Netherlands) e.f.tjong.kim.sang (at) rug.nl Please direct questions about the CoNLL website to Erik. ($Date: 2010-06-12 19:50:29 +0000 (Sun, 30 May 2010) $)