2012Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

The SIGFSM is actively meeting via two workshops, FSMNLP and ATANLP. ATANLP is a new workshop on applications of tree automata and meets in ACL as a one day workshop, while FSMNLP has been slightly bigger and has often been organized at locations where a local researcher community have otherwise been involved in developing or using finite-state techniques and thus willing to organize a related event anyhow.

Two obvious challenges of the SIG are finding a long-term journal plan for the extended workshop papers and migrating the previous proceedings to the ACL Anthology. In addition, the overhead work in workshop organization should be reduced by a periodic plan for more widely accessible FSMNLP workshops in conjunction of big ACL meetings.

Membership

In 2012, the membership count of the SIGFSM is slowly growing being still well under 100. A new membership campaign should be implemented well before the elections (there are some 200 people receiving the FSMNLP meeting announcements individually and the ATANLP attendants have not been asked).

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on 11 May, 2010 and is to end in 2012:

• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (President)
• Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
• Laurette Pretorius (Secretary)

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative in ACL 2012: Matthieu Constant (or Andreas Maletti)
• Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
• Web Site Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
• Web Content Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth

SIGFSM Business Meeting and International Advisory Committee

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) were nominated already in 2010 and 2012 by the president and they are to continue at this position for (at least) the year 2012 by default.

• Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France)
• Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) 2012-
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France)
• Måns Hulden (University of Helsinki, Finland) 2012-
• Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA)
• Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA)
• András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary)
• Marco Kuhlman (Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Sweden) 2012-
• Andreas Maletti (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
• Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA)
• the elected officers

Events and Publications

FSMNLP

• FSMNLP 2011 was organized in Blois, France, jointly with CIAA 2011 (Conference on Implementation and Applications of Automata) because the organizers and the dates of both events were close enough. 14 long and 3 short papers have been accepted to FSMNLP 2011. In terms of participation, the CIAA/FSMNLP 2011 in Blois was a very successful event: [1] (see the picture). Many CIAA 2011 attendees participated both conferences.

• The final FSMNLP 2011 proceedings appeared in the ACL Anthology at http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/sigfsm.html .

SIGFSM Business Meetings

• A FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting in Blois discussed two proposals for the future venues. The International Advisory Board later confirmed the future plans: FSMNLP 2012 in Donostia -- San Sebastian, Spain and FSMNLP 2013 in St. Andrews, UK.

• There were repeated expressions of shared interest towards a joint workshop with SIGFSM and SIGMORPHON. It was concluded that such plans would be best realized in an ACL hosted main conference. This has been also the preference for ATANLP, a SIGFSM endorsed series of workshops.

ATANLP

• SIGFSM was asked to endorse the proposal for an EACL 2012 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata Techniques in Natural Language Processing (ATANLP 2012).
• The workshop took place in April 24, 2012 in Avignon, France [2].
• The preproceedings and the final EACL proceedings of the workshop were published are online, available at [3] and http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/sigfsm.html
• The ATANLP 2010 proceedings have not yet collected to the same page in the ACL Anthology.

Elections

• The second SIGFSM elections are due in 2012. The elections are going to be held after the FSMNLP 2012 workshop. More candidates can be nominated in this way.

Financial Report

The SIG has a nominal amount of cash received from previous workshop organizers as surplus, but has been reduced by consumption to invited talks of latter workshops.

Previous Reports

[4] 2009 [5] 2010 [6] 2011 [7] 2012 [8] 2013