2014Q3 Reports: SIGWAC
General
The Special Interest Group on the Web as Corpus (SIGWAC) has 192 members as of 10 June 2014 (based on subscriptions to the SIGWAC mailing list).
The SIGWAC community keeps in touch through a mailing list (http://devel.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/sigwac) and the SIGWAC home page (http://sigwac.org.uk/).
The SIGWAC board
Elections were held in July 2012. There were only two nominations for the two vacant positions, who were thus elected unopposed.
- Chair: Stefan Evert (http://www.stefan-evert.de/)
Professor of Corpus Linguistics, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg - Secretary: Egon W. Stemle (http://www.eurac.edu/staff/estemle/)
Researcher at European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano
The current board serves from 1 Aug 2012 to 31 July 2015.
WAC-9 Workshop 2014
The yearly meeting of SIGWAC took place at the 9th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-9) on 26 April 2014 in conjunction with the EACL 2014 Conference (Gothenburg, Sweden). It was co-organized by Felix Bildhauer and Roland Schäfer (FU Berlin). A detailed scientific programme can be found on the WAC-9 homepage, the proceedings are available in the ACL Anthology.
Events planned for 2015
SIGWAC intends to organize the 10th edition of the Web as Corpus workshop in 2015. Convenors, location and further details are to be confirmed.
The SIGWAC community is also interested in a new shared task on pre-processing and annotation of Web corpora, following up on the successful CLEANEVAL competition in 2007. SIGWAC endorses the shared task on tokenization and POS tagging of German CMC and Web data to be organized by the Empirikom research network in 2015. An international task is planned for 2015 or 2016.