SIGNLL (Natural Language Learning)
Walter Daelemans

In 2000 SIGNLL has an estimated 240 members (judging from the on-line
information, and controlled for inactive email addresses). The SIGNLL
home page is located at URL http://www.aclweb.org/signll/.

The goals of the SIG (promoting of and informing about research on
computational language learning) are served by the following two
activities: (i) the maintenance of an informative and up-to-date
website, and (ii) the organization of at least one yearly event
(CoNLL), and support of other related activities.

The web-pages, maintained by Antal van den Bosch, remain an important
source of information, complemented by an email list for conference
announcements. On the web-site, links can be found to relevant
assocations, networks, research cooperations, research departments,
groups, institutes, individuals, mailing lists, archives, journals,
bulletins, conference reports, online papers, online courses and
slides, bibliographies, software, corpora, companies, meta-information
sources etc.

The main event in 2000 was the fourth CoNLL (SIGNLL Conference on
Natural Language Learning), organized with the 5th ICGI (International
Colloquium on Grammar Inference) and the second LLL (Learning Language
in Logic) in Lisbon, Portugal. Because of joint registration for the
three events, and fusion of the latter two, we are unsure about the
exact partipation numbers. Overall, 100 participants from 22 countries
were attracted by the program. 37 of the CoNLL submissions were
incorporated in lecture sessions, a poster session, and a successful
shared task session in which systems were submitted and evaluated for
the task of chunking.

The fifth CoNLL will be held in Toulouse in conjunction with
ACL/EACL. We received more than 60 submissions (comparable to ECML) of
which 20 were accepted (not counting the shared task, which is about
clause segmentation this year), and there will be invited talks by
Eric Brill and John Nerbonne. At the time of writing (May, 2000)
already more than 60 people registered for the workshop.

Current president is Walter Daelemans, secretary Claire Cardie, and
the advisory board consists of Thorsten Brants, Michael Brent, James
Cussens, Raymond Mooney, John Nerbonne, Miles Osborne, David Powers,
Dan Roth, and Ronan Reilly. Our SIGDAT Liaison Representative remains
David Yarowsky, and our Information Officer Antal van den Bosch. The
offices of president and secretary are up for election again in 2001.
These elections will be organized after the summer of 2001.

We think SIGNLL is still unique in its multiple focus (computational
models of language learning both for language engineering and for
testing psycholinguistic and linguistic theories; formal and empirical
aspects of learning of both artificial and natural languages). We
think we have successfully strived for complementarity with related
SIGDAT events such as EMNLP and WVLC, and have contributed to
interdisciplinary communication by our conference co-location policy.