SIGNLL (Walter Daelemans)
=========================

ACL SIGNLL - President's Report 1999

In 1999 SIGNLL has an estimated 210 members and our web pages are
relatively frequently browsed (40 hits per week). Joining SIGNLL is
possible via the SIGNLL home page located at URL
http://www.aclweb.org/signll/.  The membership of SIGNLL is still
diverse both in nationality and in research area indicated
(psychology, linguistics, machine learning, computational linguistics,
grammar induction, and other more peripheral areas).

Updating of the web-pages (where links can be found to relevant
assocations, networks, research cooperations, research departments,
groups, institutes, individuals, mailing lists, archives, journals,
bulletins, conference reports, online papers, online courses and
slides, bibliographies, software, corpora, companies, meta-information
sources etc.) remains one of the main services of the SIG (done by
SIGNLLs information officer dr. Antal van den Bosch).  Information
relevant to the NLL community is regularly distributed through an
email list derived from the membership records. The provision of
resources to the NLL research community remains a major goal.

The main event in 1999 was the third CoNLL (SIGNLL Conference on
Natural Language Learning), organized in co-location with the EACL in
Bergen, Norway. Meanwhile also the fourth CoNLL has been organized in
Lisbon, Portugal, co-located with ICGI (the Grammar Inference
conference), and LLL (Learning Language in Logic). The number of
contributions for these CoNLL meetings was 14 and 37, respectively,
indicating a growing acquaintance of the research community with
CoNLL.

An election for president and secretary was held in 1999. Elected
president of SIGNLL for 2000-2001 is Walter Daelemans (University of
Antwerp) and secretary for that period is Claire Cardie (Cornell
University).  Our new international Advisory Committee consist of
Thorsten Brants, Michael Brent, James Cussens, Raymond Mooney, John
Nerbonne, Miles Osborne, David Powers, and Ronan Reilly. Our SIGDAT
Liaison Representative remains David Yarowsky, and our Information
Officer Antal van den Bosch.

We think SIGNLL is still unique in its multiple focus (computational
models of language learning both for language engineering and for
testing psycholinguistic and linguistic theories; formal and empirical
aspects of learning of both artificial and natural languages). We
think we have successfully strived for complementarity with related
SIGDAT events such as EMNLP and WVLC, and have contributed to
interdisciplinary communication by our conference co-location policy. 

Immediate plans for the future are the organization of a successful
fifth CoNLL in 2001 with a "shared task" to focus attention of
researchers, and setting up a "living bibliography" on our website
involving members of the research community.


Walter Daelemans
Antwerp, 18 September 2000