2026Q3 Reports: SIGNLL
SIGNLL Annual Report (2025-26)
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. The SIGNLL's main activities are the organization of annual events (the CoNLL conference and the CoNLL shared tasks), and support of other related activities. The SIG's current focus is on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications.
Our websites, located at URL http://www.signll.org for SIGNLL and at http://www.conll.org for CoNLL are maintained by SIGNLL's information officer Jens Lemmens (from the University of 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).
CoNLL 2026
CoNLL 2026 will take place on July 3rd and 4th in San Diego, California, and will be collocated with ACL 2026. The program chairs are Claire Bonial (Georgetown University), and Yevgeni Berzak (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology). The publicity chairs are Harish Tayyar Madabushi (University of Bath), Charlotte Pouw (University of Amsterdam) and Bastian Bunzeck (Bielefeld University). The publications chairs are Katrien Beuls (Université de Namur) and Paul Van Eecke (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
The conference received 257 archival submissions, an increase of 18% compared to last year (which in itself was a major increase over 2024's 97 submissions). We believe that the collocation with ACL is considerably more effective than previous collocations with EMNLP.
The most popular primary areas of submission were (number of submissions in parentheses): Theoretical Analysis and Interpretation of ML Models for NLP (59), Computational Psycholinguistics, Cognition and Linguistics (36), Resources and Tools for Scientifically Motivated Research (29), Interaction and Dialogue (22), Computational Social Science and Sociolinguistics (21).
The conference chairs employed a stricter policy of alignment to the conference's main theme of theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics, and rejected submissions that did not align with this focus.