FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

CoNLL-2003: Seventh Conference on Natural Language Learning

Organized at HLT-NAACL-03, Edmonton, Canada

May 31 - June 1 2003

http://cnts.uia.ac.be/conll2003/

CoNLL is an international forum for discussion and presentation of research on natural language learning. We invite submission of papers about natural language learning topics, including, but not limited to:

CoNLL is the yearly meeting organized by SIGNLL, the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning. Previous CoNLL meetings were held in Madrid (1997), Sydney (1998), Bergen (1999) Lisbon (2000), Toulouse (2001), and Taipei (2002).

See http://www.aclweb.org/signll/ and http://ilk.uvt.nl/~signll/conll.html for more information about SIGNLL and CoNLL.

Special Theme

As in previous years, in addition to submissions on the general topics listed above, we encourage submissions on a special theme. This year's special theme is:

Semi-supervised / unsupervised learning and sample selection techniques for language learning (co-training, active learning, EM, etc).

Supervised Machine Learning methods suffer from a "data annotation bottleneck" which is especially harmful for language learning tasks where a lot of training data is needed (e.g. parsing). Sample selection techniques, and combination of supervised learning with semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques may provide a solution to this problem.

Shared Task

This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task: machine learning approaches to named entity recognition. Special attention will be given to the use of multiple sources of knowledge, like training data, lists of examples and unannotated data. Interested groups will be supplied with the same training and testing material (in several languages), and will all use the same evaluation criteria, thus allowing comparison between various learning methods.

More information on the shared task is available at:

http://cnts.uia.ac.be/conll2003/ner/

Invited Speaker

STEVEN ABNEY
Understanding the Yarowsky Algorithm

Submissions

Main Session Submissions

Submit a full paper of no more than 8 pages (Postscript, PDF or plain text ASCII) by March 16, 2003 electronically to the address below. Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to produce a final paper to be published in the proceedings of the workshop, which will be available at the workshop for participants, and distributed afterwards by ACL. Final submissions must follow the HLT-NAACL style. We strongly recommend the use of these style files also in the submission.

Submit main session papers to:

Walter Daelemans
daelem@uia.ua.ac.be
CNTS Language Technology Group, University of Antwerp,
Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Antwerpen, Belgium.
Tel: +32 3 8202766; Fax: +32 3 8202662

Shared Task Submissions

Submit a paper of maximum 4 pages describing the learning approach, and your results on the test set by March 16, 2003 to the address below (preferably by email). A special section of the proceedings will be devoted to a comparison and analysis of the results and to a description of the approaches used. Submit shared task submissions to:

Erik Tjong Kim Sang, erikt@uia.ua.ac.be or
Centrum Nederlandse Taal en Spraak
Linguistics, Department of Germanic languages and literature
UIA, University of Antwerp
Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium

Important Dates

Programme Committee

Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp and Tilburg (Belgium and Netherlands), co-chair
Miles Osborne, University of Edinburgh (UK), co-chair
Erik Tjong Kim Sang, University of Antwerp (Belgium), shared task chair
Thorsten Brants, Google Inc. (USA)
Claire Cardie, Cornell University (USA)
James Cussens, University of York (UK)
Ido Dagan, Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas (USA)
Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan)
Raymond Mooney, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
John Nerbonne, University of Groningen (Netherlands)
Hwee-Tou Ng, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
Grace Ngai, Intendi Inc. (Hong Kong),
David Powers, Flinders University (Australia)
Adwait Ratnaparkhi, Microsoft (USA)
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah (USA)
Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University (Netherlands)


Last update: March 04, 2003. erikt@uia.ua.ac.be