2025Q3 Reports: SIGNLL

SIGNLL Annual Report (2024-25)

The main goal of SIGNLL, ACL's special interest group on natural language learning, is to promote and inform about research on computational modeling of learning in natural languages. This is 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 http://www.conll.org for CoNLL were maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Pieter Fivez until March 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 Omri Abend (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and the current SIGNLL secretary is Antske Fokkens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

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, Dan Roth, Julia Hockemaier, and Afra Alishahi; and the larger SIGNLL International Advisory Board (see http://www.signll.org/officers for a complete description of SIGNLL officers and boards). As of July 1, SIGNLL has 430 registered members.

CoNLL 2024

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.

The CoNLL conference 2024 was collocated with EMNLP 2024 in Miami. The program chairs were Malihe Alikhani (Northeastern University) and Libby Barak (Montclair State university). The publication chairs were Mert Inan (Northeastern University) and Julia Watson (University of Toronto). CoNLL 2024 ended up hosting the 2nd edition of the BabyLM challenge.

CoNLL 2025

CoNLL 2025 will take place on July 31st and August 1st in Vienna, Austria, and will be collocated with ACL 2025. The program chairs are Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Michael Roth (University of Technology Nuremberg). The publicity chairs are Snigdha Chaturvedi (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Anvesh Rao Vijini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The publication chairs will be Emily Cheng (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Selina Meyer (University of Technology Nuremberg).

The conference got 218 archival and 20 non-archival submissions, which was a significant increase relative to the 97 submissions received in 2024.

The conference was also supposed to host a shared task, titled “Robust Word Sense Induction” (organizers: Ondřej Herman and Miloš Jakubíček and Pavel Rychlý and Vojtěch Kovář / Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic). The shared task was selected in a competitive process, following an open call. Nevertheless, the shared task was ultimately cancelled, due to a small number of submissions.