2023Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

SIGNLL Annual Report (2022-23)

The goals of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, are to promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural language. These are served by (i) the maintenance of an informative and up-to-date website and associated mailing list, and (ii) the organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared tasks), and support of other related activities.

Our websites, located at URL http://www.signll.org for SIGNLL and at www.conll.org for CoNLL were maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Pieter Fivez until Mach 2021, and is now maintained by Jens Lemmens (also at U Antwerpen). This is complemented by an email list for announcements for SIGNLL-related events.

The current SIGNLL president is Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) and the secretary is Afra Alishahi (Tilburg University). Apart from the officers, SIGNLL also has two consultative committees. The SIGNLL Steering Committee, composed by all past SIGNLL officers: Antal van den Bosch, Claire Cardie, Xavier Carreras, Alexander Clark, Walter Daelemans, Lluis Marquez, Hwee Tou Ng, Joakim Nivre, David Powers, and Dan Roth; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://www.signll.org/officers for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards). We will hold elections for a new president and secretary in the Fall of 2023.

CoNLL 2023

Starting in 2020, to differentiate itself from other NLP conferences, CoNLL adopted a focus on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications.

In December 2023, the CoNLL conference will be collocated with EMNLP 2023 in Singapore. The program chairs are David Reitter (Google DeepMind, New York City) and Jing Jiang (Singapore Management University, Singapore) who also acts as the local chair. The publication chair is Shumin Deng (National University of Singapore). Submission deadline is now closed and reviewing is underway.

Together with CMCL 2023, CoNLL 2023 will host the babyLM Challenge shared task organized by Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Kundan Krishna, Tal Linzen, Haokun Liu, Aaron Mueller, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Wilcox, Adina Williams and Chengxu Zhuang.