Main | Program
Seventh International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2020/21)
8/9 September 2021 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Co-located with SEMANTiCS 2021
The proceedings are now available in the ACL Anthology
The workshop was originally planned for 2020 but was postponed to 2021 due to Covid-19. The workshop will be a hybrid one: online as well as physical participation will be possible.
This workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL) has a broad scope and embraces all approaches that are based on natural language and apply restrictions on vocabulary, grammar, and/or semantics. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) approaches that have been called simplified language, plain language, formalized language, processable language, fragments of language, phraseologies, conceptual authoring, language generation, and guided natural language interfaces.
Some CNLs are designed to improve communication among humans, especially for non-native speakers of the respective natural language. In other cases, the restrictions on the language are supposed to make it easier for computers to analyze such texts in order to improve computer-aided, semi-automatic, or automatic translations into other languages. A third group of CNL has the goal to enable reliable automated reasoning and formal knowledge representation from seemingly natural texts. All these types of CNL are covered by this workshop.
Important Dates
- paper submission deadline: 16 May 2021 (extended)
- notification of acceptance: 22 June 2021
- camera-ready papers: 5 July 2021
- workshop: 8/9 September 2021
Venue and Registration
The workshop will be at the Meervaart Theatre in Amsterdam, together with the SEMANTiCS conference. Online as well as physical participation will be possible.
You can register via the SEMANTiCS registration system. To attend both CNL workshop days, you will need to minimally purchase two single day tickets (either online or onsite). The 4-day pass also includes the workshop days. We hope that most participants will choose to attend both workshop days, but registering for only one of the days is also possible.
Topics
Possible topics for CNL 2020/21 include:
- CNL for knowledge representation
- CNL for query interfaces
- CNL for specifications
- CNL for business rules
- CNL for dialogue systems
- CNL for machine translation
- CNL for improved understandability of texts
- CNL for natural language generation
- design of CNLs
- CNL applications
- CNL evaluation
- usability and acceptance of CNL
- CNL grammars and lexica
- multilingual CNLs
- reasoning in CNL
- spoken CNL
- CNL in the context of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data
- CNL in the government
- CNL in industry
- CNL use cases
- theoretical properties of CNL
Submissions and Proceedings
We invite researchers to submit papers with novel contributions in the area of CNL. We are looking for two types of papers, formatted in two-column ACL style:
- Full papers with novel research results and/or in-depth case descriptions should not exceed 8 pages (accepted papers will get a long presentation slot at the workshop)
- Short papers (including demo/white papers) that shortly introduce a system, approach, or opinion should not exceed 4 pages (accepted papers will get a shorter presentation slot at the workshop)
Submission should be done via EasyChair here. Full and short paper will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the ACL Anthology.
There will also be a business track, for which you can submit extended abstracts:
- Business track abstracts of 1 or 2 pages (excluding graphics) describing a business application or business case (accepted abstracts will get a presentation slot in the business track session)
Keynote Speakers
- Bob Kowalski, Imperial College London
- Piek Vossen, VU Amsterdam
- Mariette Lokin, Douane Nederland
Organization Committee
- Tobias Kuhn, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, Netherlands
- Stijn Hoppenbrouwers, HAN University of Applied Sciences and Radboud University, Netherlands
- Norbert E. Fuchs, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Program Committee
- Krasimir Angelov (Digital Grammars, Sweden)
- Mihael Arcan (National University of Ireland, Galway)
- John Camilleri (Digital Grammars, Sweden)
- Brian Davis (Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland)
- Ronald Denaux, (Expert System, Spain)
- Ramona Enache (Microsoft, Sweden)
- Sebastien Ferre (University Rennes 1, France)
- Antske Fokkens (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Albert Gatt (University of Malta)
- Normunds Gruzitis (University of Latvia)
- Yannis Haralambous (IMT Atlantique, France)
- Herbert Lange (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
- Kaarel Kaljurand (Nuance Communications, Austria)
- Maria Keet (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
- John P. McCrae (National University of Ireland, Galway)
- Roser Morante (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Gordon Pace (University of Malta)
- Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa)
- Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)
- Giovanni Sileno (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Irina Temnikova (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
- Mike Rosner (University of Malta)
- Camilo Thorne (Elsevier, Germany)
- Adam Wyner (Swansea University, UK)
Previous Events
There were six previous events in the same series: