APOLOGIES FROM MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS CALL FOR PAPERS CoNLL-2001 Fifth Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop Toulouse, France, July 6-7, 2001 http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2001/ BACKGROUND CoNLL is the yearly workshop organized by SIGNLL, the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning (http://www.aclweb.org/signll/). Previous CoNLL meetings were held in Madrid (1997), Sydney (1998), Bergen (1999) and Lisbon (2000). The 2001 event will be held as a two-days workshop at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), July 6-11, 2001 in Toulouse, France. This year, a special theme will be the focus of the workshop: Interaction and Automation in Language Learning Resources Apart from this special theme, the workshop will accept contributions about language learning topics, including, but not limited to: - Computational models of human language acquisition - Computational models of the origins and 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 analyses of language learning - Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods - Models of induction and analogy in Linguistics This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task (segmenting a text into clauses-clausing). THE WORKSHOP Main Session Theme: Interaction and Automation in Language Learning Resources The purpose of the special theme is to present and discuss state-of-the-art learning mechanisms for the automated acquisition of language resources (dictionaries, ontologies, grammars) or the automated adaptation of natural language resources/processors to new domains or languages. The dimensions of learning that are of interest for this session include: - The integration of humans/linguists in the learning process - The structure of the training data - The kind of knowledge that is learned - General study of learning methods that are suitable for natural language related tasks Lately there have been new learning mechanisms that use either large amounts of raw data or small sets of carefully constructed tagged training samples. Learning language can be construed as learning numbers or parameters for some statistical or symbolic system, or learning rules assigning structures to input data (or a mix of those). Learning can be done off-line, which introduces the problem of interpreting (if needed) the derived knowledge before its use in an NLP engine; or on-line, which raises user interaction problems. Different approaches are tailored to solve different kinds of problems subject to a different balance of requirements (large vs. small training set, tagged vs. untagged training data, results needs interpretation or can be used as is, etc.). While this session aims at presenting the largest panorama of learning techniques, we encourage submission of work on semi-automated learning techniques that involve interaction with a human during the learning process or the intervention of a linguist for interpreting results. Special Session: Shared Task - Segmenting Text Into Clauses We invite groups to take part in a shared task: Segmenting a Text Into Clauses (Clausing). Participating groups will be provided with the same training and testing material, and will all use the same evaluation criteria, thus allowing comparison between various learning technologies. After Chunking, the CoNLL-2000 shared task, Clausing can be seen as the next step towards a full parsing. More information on this shared task is available at: http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2001/clauses/ Invited Session: Learning Computational Grammars There will be a special session devoted to the presentation and discussion of results of the EU Learning Computational Grammars project (Coordinator: John Nerbonne). Project participants include: the University of Groningen (The Netherlands, coordinator), University of Antwerp (Belgium), the University of Tuebingen (Germany), SRI Cambridge (UK), the University College Dublin (Ireland), the University of Geneva (Switzerland), and Xerox Grenoble (France). Invited Speaker (to be announced) SUBMISSIONS Format for Paper Submissions for Main Session Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words (Postscript or ASCII) by April 6, 2001 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 afterwards by the ACL. Submit main session abstracts to: Walter Daelemans, walter.daelemans@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 or Rmi Zajac, zajac@crl.nmsu.edu Computing Research Laboratory New Mexico State University PO Box 30001 Dept. 3CRL Las Cruces NM 88003 USA Format For Shared Task Submissions Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words describing the learning approach, and your results on the test set by April 6, 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@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: April 6, 2001 Deadline for Shared Task Submission: April 6, 2001 Notification: April 27, 2001 Deadline camera-ready full paper: May 16, 2001 Workshop: July 6/7, 2001 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Walter Daelemans (co-chair) Rmi Zajac (co-chair) Thorsten Brants (Xerox PARC, USA) Michael Brent (Washington University in Saint Louis, USA) Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA) James Cussens (University of York, UK) Herve Dejean (University of Tuebingen, Germany) Gregory Grefenstette (Xerox Grenoble, France) Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA) John Nerbonne (Groningen University, Netherlands) Kemal Oflazer (Sabanci University, Turkey) Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh, UK), David Powers (Flinders University, Australia) Ronan Reilly (University College Dublin, Ireland) Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Erik Tjong Kim Sang (University of Antwerp, Belgium) Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, Netherlands) Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)