====================================================================== CoNLL-2014 Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Baltimore, Maryland, USA June 26-27, 2014 http://www.conll.org/ ====================================================================== Second Call for Papers ====================================================================== CoNLL is the yearly conference organized by SIGNLL (the ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning). This year, CoNLL will be collocated with ACL 2014 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The shared task of CoNLL will be Grammatical Error Correction, see details below. Important Dates --------------- * Paper submission deadline: March 14, 2014, 23:59 EST (GMT-6) * Notification of acceptance: April 21, 2014 * Camera-ready copy deadline: April 30, 2014 * Conference: June 26-27, 2014 (straight after ACL 2014) Topics ------ CoNLL is an international conference for research on natural language learning. We invite the submission of papers on all aspects of computational approaches to natural language learning, including, but not limited to: * Development and empirical evaluation of machine learning methods applied to any natural language or speech processing task in supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised settings (e.g. structured prediction, graphical models, deep learning, relational learning, reinforcement learning, etc.). * Theoretical analyses of learning-based approaches to natural language processing. * Computational models of human language acquisition, language evolution and language change. Special Topic of Interest: Machine Reading ------------------------------------------ For this edition of CoNLL, we particularly solicit papers that focus on machine reading, "the automatic, unsupervised understanding of text" (Etzioni et al. 2006), which involves processes such as text analysis, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, learning, inference, optimization, reasoning, and information fusion. The field is evolving rapidly thanks to the research performed in projects such as TextRunner (Banko, Cafarella, and Etzioni 2007), the Watson system of IBM (Ferrucci et al. 2010), ReVerb (Fader et al 2011), or NELL (Mitchel 2010) and the DARPA Machine Reading program (Strassel et al. 2010). We solicit papers related to all aspects of Machine Reading with special interest in papers that report research on inference. Invited speakers ---------------- We are pleased to announce that Prof. Tom Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon University) and Prof. Morten H. Christiansen (Cornell University) have accepted to be invited speakers at CoNLL-2014. Best Paper Award ---------------- As in recent CoNLL conferences, we are delighted to announce that Microsoft and Google will sponsor a Best Paper Award for the authors of the highest quality paper. The most important aspects in judging the quality of a paper will be: originality, innovativeness, relevance, and impact of the presented research. Main Session Submission Details ------------------------------- A paper submitted to CoNLL-2014 must describe original, unpublished work. Submit a full paper by March 14, 2014, 23:59 EST (GMT-6). Papers may have up to eight (8) pages of content, with two (2) additional pages of references, and will be presented orally or as a poster presentation as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between full papers presented orally and those presented as poster presentations. We require the use of the ACL 2014 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. Papers must conform to the official ACL 2014 style guidelines. Authors who are unable to use these style files or submit a PDF file electronically should contact the program co-chairs. Submissions can be made via the following link: https://www.softconf.com/acl2014/CoNLL2014 Authors may also optionally submit a second document containing supporting information such as proofs or algorithmic details. Reviewers will have access to the supporting information and may refer to it at their discretion. Any information that is critical to understanding the paper should be included within the paper itself. Since reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations, and there should be no self-references that reveal the authors' identity. In the submission form, you will be asked for the following information: paper title, authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses, contact author's email address, a list of keywords, abstract of no more than 300 words, and information on whether the paper has been or will be simultaneously submitted to other conferences (and if so which conferences). The contact author of an accepted paper under multiple submission will need to promptly inform the program co-chairs whether he or she intends the accepted paper to appear in CoNLL-2014. A paper that is submitted to be included in CoNLL-2014 must be withdrawn from other conferences. Authors of accepted submissions are to produce a final paper to be published in the proceedings of the conference, which will be available at the conference for participants, and distributed afterwards by ACL. Final papers must also follow the ACL 2014 style and should have at most 8 pages of content plus at most 2 extra pages for references only. At least one author must register for the conference and present the paper. Please do not submit a paper if you do not plan to attend the conference. As in previous years, CoNLL-2014 will include a shared task which is organized by a separate committee. The details of the shared task are included in this CFP (see below). Please note the different submission details and deadlines for the shared task. Conference Chairs ----------------- Roser Morante CLiPS University of Antwerp Scott Wen-tau Yih Microsoft Research Contact email: conll2014@conll.org Shared Task: Grammatical Error Correction ----------------------------------------- CoNLL 2014 will continue the CoNLL tradition of having a high profile shared task in natural language processing. This year's shared task will be grammatical error correction, a continuation of the CoNLL shared task in 2013. A participating system in this shared task is given short English essays written by non-native speakers of English. The system detects the grammatical errors present in the input essays, and returns the corrected essays. The shared task in 2014 will require a participating system to correct all errors present in an essay (i.e., not restricted to just the five error types required in 2013). The organization of the CoNLL 2014 shared task will be led by Hwee Tou Ng at the National University of Singapore. Important Dates --------------- November 22, 2013: announcement of shared task December 5, 2013: set up of shared task website December 27, 2013: registration begins and release of training set and scorer January 22, 2014: registration deadline March 16, 2014: test set available March 19, 2014: systems' outputs collected March 26, 2014: system results due to participants April 2, 2014: shared task system papers due April 11, 2014: reviews due April 14, 2014: notification of acceptance April 21, 2014: camera ready version of shared task system papers due June 26-27, 2014: CoNLL-2014 conference (Baltimore, Maryland, USA) Contact ------- Questions about the CoNLL 2014 shared task can be sent to conll14st@gmail.com. SIGNLL ------ See http://www.signll.org and http://www.signll.org/conll for more information about SIGNLL and CoNLL.