Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

The 2008 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning is the twelfth in the series of yearly meetings organized by SIGNLL, the ACL special interest group on natural language learning. CoNLL 2008 will be held in Manchester, UK, August 16-17, 2008, in conjunction with Coling 2008. We are delighted to report that CoNLL's main session received a large number of submissions. A total of 85 papers were under consideration for the main session after several withdrawals, and of them only 20 were accepted. This makes this year's CoNLL especially competitive and contributes to an interesting program. We are grateful to the program committee members for their service in evaluating the submissions. Special thanks to the program committee members who joined on a short notice to help with the larger than expected number of submissions. This year CoNLL had two special themes of interest, both of which solicited papers on models that explain natural phenomena relating to human language. The first concerned the central scientific problem addressed by CoNLL: the study of first language acquisition. The second theme was the central engineering problem: how to build systems that do something useful, especially complete systems that solve real problems.