Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Computational Natural Language Learning - Volume 7

This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at the 2001 workshop on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2001), a SIGNLL meeting held in Toulouse, France, July 6 and 7 in conjunction with the International and the European Conferences of the ACL.CoNLL-2001 is the fifth in a series of meetings organized by SIGNLL, the ACL special interest group on natural language learning. The CoNLL meeting is intended to address all aspects of computational natural language learning, including those that are not regularly discussed at computational linguistics meetings, such as computational models of human language acquisition, computational models of the origins and evolution of language, biologically-inspired learning methods etc.This year, we have a special theme on 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 include the integration of humans/linguists in the learning process, the structure of the training data (especially, minimization of the training set), and the kind of knowledge that is learned.This year's CoNLL also features two invited presentations, one by Eric Brill on whether the web changes empirical NLP, and one by John Nerbonne on the results of a successful European project on Learning Computational Grammars. As in the previous two editions of CoNLL, we have a shared task session, coordinated by Erik Tjong Kim Sang and Hervé Déjean. For this session, training and test data were made available, and researchers were invited to apply their learning system to this task. This year the task is clause identification. Six systems have participated, five from Europe and one from Australia. You will find descriptions of these systems and their results in this proceedings.