2010Q3 Reports: ACL Wiki
ACL Wiki for Computational Linguistics - Report for 2010
Peter Turney peter.turney@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
[June 10, 2010]
The ACL Wiki opened to the public on October 18th, 2006. The mandate of the wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. The ACL Wiki includes pointers to corpora, software, journals, conferences, workshops, blogs, researcher home pages, state-of-the-art system comparisons, employment opportunities, course descriptions, and many other resources for computational linguists.
The following table summarizes the growth of the wiki. The number of page views has increased each year. The yearly number of page edits has been constant, with a shift from the creation of new pages to the refinement and expansion of existing pages. Current statistics are available online on the Wiki.
| Year | Cumulative page views | Yearly page views | Daily page views | Cumulative edits | Yearly edits | Daily edits | Number of long pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 1,230,000 | 480,000 | 1,315 | 8,000 | 2,000 | 5 | 293 |
| 2009 | 750,000 | 400,000 | 1,095 | 6,000 | 2,000 | 5 | 267 |
| 2008 | 350,000 | 250,000 | 685 | 4,000 | 2,000 | 5 | 235 |
| 2007 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 275 | 2,000 | 2,000 | 5 | 100 |
The wiki hosts two Community Portals, the Natural Language Generation Portal and the Textual Entailment Portal. Both portals contain a wealth of useful information for researchers in these communities. Community Portals are an excellent tool for supporting a community of researchers who share a common interest in a specific problem.
The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity has now used the ACL Wiki as its home page for two years, CALC-09 and CALC-10. Other workshops and conferences may also find it convenient to use the ACL Wiki to host their pages. The advantages include easy setup, easy editing, stability, archiving, and a recognized and respected URL.
There are many interesting and useful pages in the ACL Wiki, covering a wide range of material, which makes it difficult to summarize the wiki. A good starting point for exploration might be the List of resources by language, which covers more than 50 different languages. Another useful resource is the List of NLP/CL courses.
Spammers occasionally insert spam links in the ACL Wiki, but the Bad Behavior software package automatically blocks most link spam. Manual intervention is only required sporadically.
All members of ACL are strongly encouraged to contribute to the ACL Wiki. Whatever subfield of Computational Linguistics you work in, this is your opportunity to raise the profile of research in your area. The time you invest in the ACL Wiki will have high returns for the community.