ACL SIGNLL - President's Report 2006-2007

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 task), and support of other related 
activities.

In 2006-2007 SIGNLL has grown to 484 registered members (as of May 20,
2007). The current elected board (until October 2007) is composed of 
Antal van den Bosch, president; Hwee Tou Ng, secretary; and Erik Tjong 
Kim Sang, information officer. 

The web-pages, located at URL http://www.aclweb.org/signll/ and 
maintained by Erik Tjong Kim Sang, remain an important source of 
information, complemented by an email list for announcements for 
SIGNLL-related events. On the web-site, links can be found to relevant 
associations, networks, research cooperations, research departments, 
groups, institutes, mailing lists, archives, journals, bulletins, 
conference reports, online papers (including all papers of all CoNLL 
proceedings), online courses and slides, bibliographies, software, 
corpora, companies, meta-information sources etc.

The main events in 2006-2007 were the tenth and the eleventh CoNLL 
conferences (SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language 
Learning), the latter organized jointly with SIGDAT under the header 
of EMNLP-CoNLL 2007, and yet to happen on June 28-30, 2007 in Prague, 
co-located with ACL-2007.


CoNLL-X

The tenth anniversary of CoNLL, dubbed CoNLL-X for the occasion, was 
celebrated in New York, 8-9 June, 2006, co-located with HLT-NAACL
(http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll2006/). Programme chairs were Lluis 
Marquez and Dan Klein. The two-day event featured invited talks by 
Michael Collins and Walter Daelemans. Of 53 full paper submissions, 18 
were accepted for presentation (34%). 85 registered participants 
received a celebration t-shirt showing the "CoNLL World Tour 
1997-2006" dates at the backside.

The CoNLL-X shared task focused for the first time on Dependency 
Parsing. It was organized by Sabine Buchholz, Yuval Krymolowski, Erwin 
Marsi, and Amit Dubey, and featured training, validation, and test 
sets for an impressive 13 world languages. The task was shared by 19 
participants who together submitted 247 systems.

For the first time CoNLL featured a best paper award, selected by a 
jury appointed by the CoNLL-X programme chairs. The first award went 
to Rie Kubota Ando for her paper "Applying Alternating Structure 
Optimization to WSD".


EMNLP-CoNLL 2007

In the fall of 2006, the boards of SIGDAT and SIGNLL decided to 
propose to ACL a joint EMNLP-CoNLL conference, to be aligned with 
ACL-2007 in Prague, 28-30 June, 2007. The driving reason for the 
alignment was that ACL-2007 was the only summer conference in 
computational linguistics in 2007, and both SIGs intended to align 
with it. Before, the overlap between EMNLP and CoNLL has caused the 
two SIGs, by way of liaison David Yarowsky, to develop a careful 
planning that avoided the co-location of the two events, but now the 
argument was reversed and forces were joined. Under program chair 
Jason Eisner an exciting program of 110 presentations has been 
prepared (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/EMNLP-CoNLL-2007/) on the basis of 
over 400 submissions. 66 papers will be presented as talks, and 44 as 
posters.

The CoNLL shared task for 2007 is a continuation of the CoNLL-X shared 
task on Dependency Parsing. A shared task organisation team headed by 
Joakim Nivre and further composed of Johan Hall, Sandra Kuebler, Ryan 
McDonald, Jens Nilsson, Sebastian Riedel, and Deniz Yuret organized 
two subtasks: a Multilingual Track focusing on the development of 
dependency parsers for 10 languages, and a Domain Adaptation Track 
aimed at measuring the robustness and adaptability of English 
dependency parsers for parsing data beyond the genre of the training 
set. 23 groups participated in the competition. The shared task 
session at EMNLP-CoNLL will draw the usual attention and suspense. 



Conclusion

The SIGNLL board is of the opinion that the SIG remains unique in its 
focus. We are happy to observe that the CoNLL conference series 
continues to have a significant impact on the field, partly because of 
the successful shared tasks, which have been broadly referenced and 
have contributed benchmark data sets that are commonly used throughout 
computational linguistics. We keep striving for complementarity with 
related SIGDAT events such as EMNLP. Creating a joint call for papers 
for EMNLP-CoNLL 2007 has learned us that CoNLL will remain having a 
particular focus with unique and complementary elements found nowhere 
else, and we intend to continue guarding these topics as laid out in 
the original charter of SIGNLL (http://ifarm.nl/signll/about/) as the 
core elements of CoNLL.


  Antal van den Bosch
  Tilburg, The Netherlands
  May 21, 2007