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.