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CoNLL-2011
Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Portland, Oregon, USA
June 23-24, 2011
http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/conll/
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Final Call for Papers
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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-HLT 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Important Dates
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* Paper submission deadline: March 4, 2011, 23:59 PST (GMT-8)
* Notification of acceptance: April 11, 2011
* Camera-ready copy deadline: April 22, 2011
* Conference: June 23-24, 2011 (straight after ACL-HLT 2011)
Topics
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CoNLL is an international conference for research on natural language
learning. We invite submission of papers about natural language
learning topics, including, but not limited to:
* Computational models of human language acquisition
* Supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning
methods applied to natural language, including speech
* Statistical methods (Bayesian learning, graphical models, kernel
methods, statistical models for structured problems)
* Symbolic learning methods (rule induction and decision tree
learning, lazy learning, inductive logic programming, analytical
learning, transformation-based error-driven learning)
* Biologically-inspired methods (Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing)
* Reinforcement learning, active learning
* Learning architectures for structural and relational NLP tasks
* Computational models of language evolution and historical change
* Computational learning theory analysis of language learning
* Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning
methods, including novel evaluation methods
* Models of induction and analogy in linguistics
Invited Speakers
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* Bruce Hayes (UCLA)
* Yee Whye Teh (Gatsby Unit, UCL)
Special Topic of Interest
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For CoNLL-2011, the special topic of interest is: Massive, Linked Text
Data. The scale of available natural language data is now orders of
magnitude beyond what was available when CoNLL began. Perhaps most
interestingly, this data is increasingly becoming linked and annotated
in various ways (such as the tagging systems on twitter or
deli.cio.us, linking and infoboxes on Wikipedia, or various sorts of
structured content in semantic annotation projects such as DBpedia and
Freebase). This raises new learning problems of dealing not with
classical supervised or unsupervised natural language data but rather
with large masses of heterogeneous, distantly supervised content. For
this edition of CoNLL, we particularly solicit papers that focus on
challenges and solutions within this new world.
Best Paper Award
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As in recent CoNLL conferences, we are delighted to announce that
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
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A paper submitted to CoNLL-2011 must describe original, unpublished
work. Submit a full paper by March 4, 2011, 23:59 PST (GMT-8). 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. Submission must be done electronically through the web
form at:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/conll/
We require the use of the ACL-HLT 2011 LaTeX style files or Microsoft
Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. Papers must
conform to the official ACL-HLT 2011 style guidelines. Authors who are
unable to use these style files or submit a PDF file electronically
should contact the program co-chairs. Please refer to the
Format and ACL-HLT 2011 Style Files sections only at the following
URL:
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission
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-2011. A paper
that is submitted to be included in CoNLL-2011 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-HLT 2011
style and should have at most 8 pages of content plus 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-2011 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
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Christopher D. Manning
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
Sharon Goldwater
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
Contact email: conll-2011 (at) inf.ed.ac.uk
Program Committee
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Steven Abney, Eneko Agirre, Afra Alishahi, Lourdes Araujo, Jason
Baldridge, Steven Bird, Phil Blunsom, Thorsten Brants, Chris Brew, Dan
Burkett, Yunbo Cao, Xavier Carreras, Ming-Wei Chang, Colin Cherry,
Massimiliano Ciaramita, Alexander Clark, Stephen Clark, Shay Cohen,
Trevor Cohn, James Curran, Walter Daelemans, Mark Dras, Amit Dubey,
Chris Dyer, Jacob Eisenstein, Micha Elsner, Jenny Finkel, Radu
Florian, Robert Frank, Stella Frank, Michel Galley, Kevin Gimpel, Yoav
Goldberg, Cyril Goutte, Gholamreza Haffari, Keith Hall, James
Henderson, Julia Hockenmaier, Fei Huang, Rebecca Hwa, Richard
Johansson, Mark Johnson, Rohit Kate, Philipp Koehn, Mamoru Komachi,
Terry Koo, Shankar Kumar, Tom Kwiatkowski, Mirella Lapata, Shalom
Lappin, Lillian Lee, Percy Liang, Adam Lopez, Rob Malouf, Lluís
Màrquez, André Martins, Yuji Matsumoto, Takuya Matsuzaki, David
McClosky, Ryan McDonald, Paola Merlo, Haitao Mi, Yusuke Miyao,
Alessandro Moschitti, Tetsuji Nakagawa, Tahira Naseem, Mark-Jan
Nederhof, Hwee Tou Ng, Vincent Ng, Joakim Nivre, Miles Osborne,
Christopher Parisien, Amy Perfors, Slav Petrov, Vasin Punyakanok,
Chris Quirk, Ari Rappoport, Lev Ratinov, Roi Reichart, Joseph
Reisinger, Sebastian Riedel, Dan Roth, William Sakas, Anoop Sarkar,
William Schuler, Libin Shen, Khalil Sima'an, Noah Smith, Ben Snyder,
Valentin Spitkovsky, Mark Steedman, Mihai Surdeanu, Jun Suzuki, Hiroya
Takamura, Ivan Titov, Kristina Toutanova, Antal van den Bosch, Peng
Xu, Charles Yang, Chen Yu, Daniel Zeman, Luke Zettlemoyer
Shared Task: Modeling Unrestricted Coreference in OntoNotes
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CoNLL-2011 will continue the tradition of having the highest profile
shared task in the NLP world. This year's task will be automatic
anaphoric mention detection and coreference resolution using the
English language portion of the OntoNotes 4.0 data given predicted
information on the other layers.
The shared task is described in its own Call for Participation at
http://aclweb.org/portal/content/conll-2011-shared-task. For detailed
information and submissions, please see the shared task web page at
http://conll.bbn.com
Questions about the CoNLL-2011 shared task can be sent to
conll-2011-st@bbn.com
January 15: Trial datasets (plus documentation and scorer) available
January 21: Task registration deadline (including corpora license forms)
February 1: Training and development sets available
April 1: Test set available
April 8: Systems' outputs due
April 15: Deadline for paper submission
April 29: Notification of acceptance
May 6: Deadline for camera ready papers
June 23-24: CoNLL conference, Portland, Oregon
In order to receive future calls and other information about the
shared task, participants should register their intent to participate,
in either or both of the two tracks, by sending an e-mail to
conll-2011-st@bbn.com. Although the deadline for registration is not
until January 21, 2011, we recommend participants to register as early
as possible, in order not to miss any information.
Shared Task Organizers
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Sameer Pradhan (Chair) Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA
Mitchell Marcus, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
Lance Ramshaw, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA
Ralph Weischedel, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA
Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Mentoring Service
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ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from
regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of
scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to
read the scientific literature in English, have little or no
experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the
ACL meetings. If you would like to take advantage of the service, your
paper needs to be ready earlier to allow time for feedback. Please
upload your paper in PDF format by Jan. 21 using the paper submission
software for the mentoring service below.
Submissions for mentoring: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/mentoring
Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as
described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors
to improve the technical content of their papers.
Questions about the mentoring service should be referred to
(tb at ldwin.net)
SIGNLL
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See http://ifarm.nl/signll/ and http://ifarm.nl/signll/conll/ for more
information about SIGNLL and CoNLL. Please direct questions about
SIGNLL and the CoNLL website to Erik, the SIGNLL Information Officer:
Erik Tjong Kim Sang
University of Groningen (The Netherlands)
erikt (at) xs4all.nl