2015Q3 Reports: SIGHUM

The ACL Special Interest Group on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SIGHUM) is intended to provide a forum for CL researchers who are developing language technology for data from the socio-economic sciences or the humanities (SSH). It also functions as a contact point for SSH stakeholders. ACL SIGHUM stands officially since June 2012.

Organisation & Elections

The first SIGHUM elections took place in October 2013. The voting was anonymous and the process was organised by Caroline Sporleder and Andrei Beliankou (University of Trier). The following elected board officers are serving until October 2015:

* President: Antal van den Bosch (Radboud University Nijmegen)

* Secretary: Kalliopi Zervanou (Radboud University Nijmegen)

* Liaison officer: Marieke van Erp (VU University Amsterdam)

The next election process will begin in September 2015.

Membership

SIGHUM is open to all interested parties and does not charge any membership fees. Members should be however active in CL and SSH research and applications, as indicated by their affiliation and publications. Membership involves registration and participation in the mailing list & the elections. The membership roster is maintained by the Secretary and is updated online at SIGHUM Members List. Membership currently stands at 132. An overview of membership counts for the years of the SIGHUM standing is given below:

• 2012: 70

• 2013: 85

• 2014: 110

• 2015: 132

Activities overview

• LaTeCH 2015: The LaTeCH workshop series is the main annual event endorsed by SIGHUM and the venue for the SIGHUM annual research and business meeting. It aims to provide a forum for researchers who are working on language technology research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage domains. [1] was collocated with ACL/IJCNLP 2015 in Beijing, China. It was organised by Kalliopi Zervanou, Marieke van Erp and Beatrice Alex. The program included 16 papers and the acceptance rate was 64%.
• SIGHUM website: Improvements on the website content and appearance. Gradual transition to https://sighum.wordpress.com/.

Planned activities

• SIGHUM Nominations and Elections
• SIGHUM website: Improvements on the website content and appearance. Members are encouraged in content contribution regarding relevant research, tools, resources, use cases and projects.
• SIGHUM endorsed workshops: For 2014-15, we plan to organise our annual LaTeCH workshop, preferably co-located with an ACL event. A potential venue could be the ACL-IJCNLP in Beijing so as to address our members request for a workshop organised in Asia. We would also wish to expand our liaison with Asian SSH researchers and stakeholders that are currently relatively underrepresented in our group. Moreover, we would like to be more actively involved in the Digital Humanities community, possibly by organising a SIGHUM endorsed event collocated with the DH conference.
• SIGHUM volunteers: We plan to encourage our members to participate more actively in the SIG organisation. For this purpose, we seek volunteers to undertake mainly liaison activities with related communities, such as CLARIN, DH, etc.