Affected: nltk

NLTK before 3.10.4 contains a quadratic-time denial of service vulnerability in ConllCorpusReader._get_srl_instances that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through nested span rescans. Attackers can supply a crafted CoNLL SRL corpus with many predicates and span columns, placing the head span last, to pin a core for minutes.

Affected: PyPI: nltk

## Summary

`ConllCorpusReader.srl_instances()` builds semantic-role-labeling instances from a CoNLL corpus block. For a sentence block with P predicates and P span columns, the instance builder rescans every span column (and every span within it) once per predicate while searching for each predicate's head, giving O(P^2 * R) work. A single well-formed block that places the head span in the last column forces the full scan on every predicate, so an application that reads an attacker-supplied CoNLL SRL corpus can be driven into tens of seconds of single-threaded CPU. No authentication or user interaction is required.

## Root Cause

`_get_srl_instances` iterates over the P predicates of a block; for each predicate it scans every span list and every span within it, using an inner `break` that stops only when a span tagged `V` or `C-V` containing the predicate word is found. When the sole head span is placed in the last span column, no earlier column matches, so the `for ... else: continue` construct traverses every span of every earlier column before matching. Over P predicates each scanning up to P columns of R spans, the cost is O(P^2 * R). The block is read whole with no size cap, and the grid-consistency check enforces only uniform column count, not a bound on P, R, or total work.

```text Affected function: - nltk.corpus.reader.conll.ConllCorpusReader._get_srl_instances (nltk/corpus/reader/conll.py:394-424; nested rescan at lines 405-419) Public entry point: nltk.corpus.r…