With an increasing number of papers in natural language processing being authored by non-native English speakers (NNSs), we think it's time the community provided more support for those authors. As a field that works on computational techniques for processing text, we're in a better position than most to do something useful; so, the aim of the HOO (Helping Our Own) shared task is to promote the use of NLP tools and techniques to help improve the textual quality of papers written by NNSs in the field.
For those interested in participating in the shared task, the test data will be released on July 29, so there's still time to put something together for the pilot round if you're quick, especially if you've worked previously in grammar checking or ESL error correction.
To find out more, and to get the HOO pilot data and evaluation tools, visit http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/research/projects/hoo/.
Robert Dale and Adam Kilgarriff