Topics

We invite the submission of papers on all aspects of computational approaches to natural language learning, including, but not limited to:

• Development and empirical evaluation of machine learning methods applied to any natural language or speech processing task in supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised settings (e.g. structured prediction, graphical models, deep learning, relational learning, reinforcement learning, etc.).
• Theoretical analyses of learning-based approaches to natural language processing.
• Computational models of human language acquisition and processing, models of language evolution and change, and simulation and analysis of psycholinguistic findings.

Special Topic

With the recent growing interest in statistical approaches to natural language learning that go beyond linear models and convex optimization, e.g., latent variable models or deep learning approaches, including recurrent and recursive networks, we are especially interested in papers dealing with theoretical or empirical analyses and of such models and their learning algorithms. This includes analysis of non-convex learning in the context of language processing, as well as theoretical or empirical results on phenomena that can and cannot be learned well with a given approach.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: May 6, 2016, 23:59 CEST (UTC/GMT+2)
• Notification: June 1, 2016
• Conference: August 11-12, 2016 (after ACL 2016)

Submission

Submissions to CoNLL-2016 must describe original, unpublished work in 8 pages of content plus 2 additional pages of references. Papers will be presented orally, or as posters with a five minute oral presentation (poster booster). All papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Submission details will be provided online at http://www.conll.org/ in time.

Best Paper Award

As in recent CoNLL conferences, a Best Paper Award will be given to 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.

Shared Task

The 2016 CoNLL Shared Task will be a follow-on to the 2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing (SDP). This 2nd edition will be multilingual. In addition to English, which will be a repeat of the 2015 Shared Task, it will also include Chinese. Registration will start in mid-January, 2016, when the training data and scorer will also be available.  The evaluation window will be in late April. Shared task results will be presented at the CoNLL conference in Berlin.

For more information and important dates of the shared task competition see http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~clp/conll16st/