CoNLL is an international conference 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:

• Computational models of human language acquisition
• Computational models of the evolution of language
• Machine learning methods applied to natural language processing tasks (speech processing, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse processing, language engineering applications)
• 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)
• Statistical methods (Bayesian Learning, HMM, maximum entropy, SNoW, Support Vector Machines)
• Reinforcement Learning
• Active learning, ensemble methods, meta-learning
• Computational Learning Theory analysis of language learning
• Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods
• Models of induction and analogy in Linguistics

We encourage the submission of papers combining (statistical) machine learning with symbolic knowledge sources.

CoNLL is the yearly conference 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), Taipei (2002), and Edmonton (2003).

See http://cnts.uia.ac.be/signll/ and http://cnts.uia.ac.be/signll/conll.html for more information about SIGNLL and CoNLL.

Shared Task

This year's conference will also accept submissions for a shared task: machine learning approaches to automatic labeling of semantic roles. Participant groups will use the same training and testing material, and the evaluation will be done according to fixed criteria, thus allowing comparison between various learning strategies.

More information on the shared task is available at the shared task web page:

http://cnts.uia.ac.be/conll2004/roles/

Invited Speaker

To be announced later.

Submissions

Main Session Submissions

A paper submitted to CoNLL-2004 must describe original, unpublished work. Submit a full paper of no more than 8 pages in PDF format by Feb 11, 2004 electronically to the email address conll04@comp.nus.edu.sg. The subject line of the email message should be "CoNLL-2004 submission", with the PDF paper as an attachment file. Only email submissions will be accepted. The submitted paper should be in two column format and follow the ACL style. 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 email message body, include the following information: paper title, authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses, contact author's email address, a list of keywords, abstract, and an indication of whether the paper has been simultaneously submitted to other conferences (and if so which conferences). The contact author of an accepted paper under multiple submissions should inform the program co-chairs immediately whether he or she intends the accepted paper to appear in CoNLL-2004. A paper that appears in CoNLL-2004 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 follow the ACL style and are due Mar 15, 2004.

Shared Task Submissions

Submit a paper of maximum 4 pages describing the learning approach, and your results on the development set by Feb 23, 2004 to the email address conll04st@lsi.upc.es (see the shared task web page for concrete formats and styles). 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.

Important Dates

Deadline for main session paper submission: Feb 11, 2004
Deadline for shared task submission: Feb 23, 2004
Notification of acceptance: Mar 1, 2004
Deadline for camera-ready papers: Mar 15, 2004
Conference: May 6-7, 2004

Conference Organizers

Hwee Tou Ng
Department of Computer Science
School of Computing
National University of Singapore
3 Science Drive 2
Singapore 117543
Email: nght@comp.nus.edu.sg

and

Ellen Riloff
School of Computing
University of Utah
50 S. Central Campus Drive, RM 3190 MEB
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205
USA
Email: riloff@cs.utah.edu

Shared Task Organizers

Xavier Carreras and Lluis Marquez
Software Department (LSI),
Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, Campus Nord).
Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3
Barcelona E-08034, Catalonia Spain
Email: {carreras,lluism}@lsi.upc.es

Program Committee

Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore (Singapore), co-chair
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah (USA), co-chair
Xavier Carreras, UPC (Spain), shared task co-chair
Lluis Marquez, UPC (Spain), shared task co-chair
Steven Abney, University of Michigan (USA)
Regina Barzilay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Thorsten Brants, Google Inc (USA)
Claire Cardie, Cornell University (USA)
Eugene Charniak, Brown University (USA)
James Cussens, University of York (UK)
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp (Belgium)
Ido Dagan, Bar Ilan University / LingoMotors (Israel)
Radu Florian, IBM (USA)
Ulf Hermjakob, USC Information Sciences Institute (USA)
Hang Li, Microsoft (China)
Dekang Lin, University of Alberta (Canada)
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan)
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas (USA)
Raymond Mooney, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
John Nerbonne, University of Groningen (Netherlands)
Grace Ngai, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong)
Franz Josef Och, USC Information Sciences Institute (USA)
Miles Osborne, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth (USA)
David Pierce, SUNY Buffalo (USA)
David Powers, Flinders University (Australia)
Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Erik Tjong Kim Sang, University of Antwerp (Belgium)
Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University (Canada)
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto (Canada)
Cynthia Thompson, University of Utah (USA)
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh (USA)