CoNLL-2014 Shared Task: Grammatical Error Correction


CoNLL-2014 will continue the CoNLL tradition of having a high profile shared task in natural language processing. This year's shared task will be grammatical error correction, a continuation of the CoNLL shared task in 2013. A participating system in this shared task is given short English texts written by non-native speakers of English. The system detects the grammatical errors present in the input texts, and returns the corrected essays. The shared task in 2014 will require a participating system to correct all errors present in an essay (i.e., not restricted to just five error types in 2013). Also, the evaluation metric will be changed to F0.5, weighting precision twice as much as recall.

The grammatical error correction task is impactful since it is estimated that hundreds of millions of people in the world are learning English and they benefit directly from an automated grammar checker. However, for many error types, current grammatical error correction methods do not achieve a high performance and thus more research is needed.

Participating teams will be provided with common training data in which grammatical errors have been annotated. Blind test data will be used to evaluate the outputs of the participating teams using a common scoring software and evaluation metric.

*NEW* Registration

Registration for the shared task has begun. To participate in the shared task, please download the license form for usage of the training data. Print the form, sign, and have the scanned PDF file of the signed form ready. You may then proceed to register your team through our registration page by providing the particulars (name, affiliation, and email address) of the main contact person and all the other team members. Please upload your scanned PDF file of the *signed* form through the same page.

After you have registered, we will get back to you within two days. If your registration is complete, you will be provided with the training data and the scorer for the shared task. You will also be added to a Google Group where discussions of the details of the shared task will take place. As such, please register early so that you are informed of the details of the shared task. If you encounter problems in registering or you do not hear from us after two days, please inform us through the shared task contact email address conll14st@gmail.com.

Important Dates

November 22, 2013: announcement of shared task
December 5, 2013: set up of shared task website
December 27, 2013: registration begins and release of training set and scorer
January 22, 2014: registration deadline
March 16, 2014: test set available
March 19, 2014: systems' outputs collected
March 26, 2014: system results due to participants
April 2, 2014: shared task system papers due
April 11, 2014: reviews due
April 14, 2014: notification of acceptance
April 21, 2014: camera ready version of shared task system papers due
June 26-27, 2014: CoNLL-2014 conference (Baltimore, Maryland, USA)
Shared Task Organizers

Hwee Tou Ng (Chair), National University of Singapore
Siew Mei Wu, National University of Singapore
Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge
Christian Hadiwinoto, National University of Singapore
Raymond Hendy Susanto, National University of Singapore
Contact

Questions about the CoNLL-2014 shared task can be sent to conll14st@gmail.com.

The shared task website is hosted by the NUS Natural Language Processing Group.