Corpora: [SIGNLL] CfP: CoNLL-02 - Second CfP and Shared Task

[Antal van den Bosch]

   SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS and
   SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN SHARED TASK: NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION

   CoNLL-2002
   Sixth Conference on Natural Language Learning

   COLING-2002 workshop W11
   Taipei, Taiwan, August 31 - September 1, 2002

   http://www.aclweb.org/signll/conll02/cfp.html

Background and Scope
--------------------

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) and Toulouse (2001). The 2002
event will be held as a two-days workshop at the 19th International
Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 24 August --
September 1, 2002 in Taipei, Taiwan.

CoNLL is organized in cooperation with SIGDAT, who have merged this
year's Very Large Corpora (VLC) workshop with CoNLL-2002. The Learning
Language in Logic (LLL) workshop series has also merged this year with
CoNLL. Researchers in VLC and LLL are encouraged to submit their paper
to CoNLL-2002.

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:

  * Computational models of human language acquisition
  * Computational models of the origins and evolution of language
  * Learning from very large corpora
  * Learning language in logic
  * 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


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:

  Using unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods
  in natural language learning

Many machine learning approaches to natural language problems require
supervision, typically in the form of labeled examples. Due to the
difficulty annotating data, there has been a significant interest
recently in the study of methods that can benefit from large amounts
of unlabeled data, perhaps in addition to relatively small amounts of
labeled examples. The purpose of the special theme is to present and
discuss progress in this direction in the context of natural language
learning and highlight both theoretical and experimental studies on a
variety of approaches to these issues.


Special Session: Shared Task - Named Entity Recognition
-------------------------------------------------------

This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task:
named entity recognition.  Participating groups will be provided 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.  Currently there are data files
available for one language: Spanish. Data for another Western European
language will be made available for the final evaluation phase.

More information on the shared task is available at:

  http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2002/ner/


Invited Speaker
---------------

John Lafferty (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA)


Submissions
-----------

Main Session Submissions

 Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words (Postscript, PDF or plain
 text ASCII) by May 2nd, 2002 electronically to the address below.
 Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to produce a full paper
 to be published in the proceedings of the workshop, which will be
 available at the workshop for participants, and distributed
 afterwords by COLING. Final submissions must follow the COLING style
 (http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/coling2002/psg.html). We strongly
 recommend the use of these style files also in the submission.

 Submit main session abstracts to:

   Dan Roth, danr at uiuc.edu
   Department of Computer Science,
   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
   1304 West Springfield Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 USA
   Tel: 217 244 7068  Fax: 217 244 6500

 or

   Antal van den Bosch, Antal.vdnBosch at kub.nl
   Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University,
   P.O. Box 90153
   NL-5000 LE Tilburg,  The Netherlands
   Tel: +31.13.4663117 Fax:  +31.13.4663110

Shared Task Submissions

 Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words describing the learning
 approach, and your results on the test set by May 15, 2001 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 at uia.ua.ac.be
   Centrum Nederlandse Taal en Spraak
   Linguistics, Department of Germanic languages and literature
   UIA, University of Antwerp
   Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium


Important Dates
---------------

 * Deadline for Abstract Submission:    May 2, 2002
 * Deadline for Shared Task Submission: May 15, 2002
 * Notification:                        May 22, 2002
 * Deadline camera-ready full paper:    June 8, 2001
 * Conference:                          August 31-September 1, 2002


Programme Committee
-------------------

 Dan Roth (University of Illinois, Urbana, USA (co-chair)
 Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, Netherlands) (co-chair)
 Thorsten Brants (PARC, USA)
 Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA)
 Ken Church (AT&T Labs-Research, USA)
 James Cussens (University of York, UK)
 Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
 Diane Litman (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
 Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
 John Nerbonne (Groningen University, Netherlands)
 Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh, UK)
 David Powers (Flinders University, Australia)
 Adwait Ratnaparkhi (WhizBang! Labs-Research, USA)
 Erik Tjong Kim Sang (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
 David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins University, USA)