2012Q3 Reports: SIGDAT

SIGDAT - Summer 2012 Report

SIGDAT is generally focused on corpus-based and statistical methods in Natural Language Processing, and encourages initiatives in support of this broader mission from its members.

SIGDAT's primary mission has been to organize a series of conferences and workshops, inluding WVLC (The Workshop on Very Large Corpora) and EMNLP (the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing). These meetings have become quite popular, and EMNLP is now typically a 3-day conference with 400-500 attendees and 1000-1600 page proceedings.

In July 2011, SIGDAT presented 15th anniversary EMNLP conference in Edinburgh, Scotland at the University of Edinburgh John McIntyre Conference Centre and Informatics Forum. The main (three parallel) sessions took place between July 27-29, followed by 2 days of workshops on July 30-31. Paola Merlo was the general chair, Regina Barzilay and Mark Johnson were program co-chairs, Bonnie Webber was the local arrangements chair, Marie Candito was the workshop chair and Wangxiang Che was the publications chair. 626 submission were received, and 149 papers were accepted (an overall rate of 23.8%). 95 papers (15%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 54 (9%) were accepted for poster presentation. In addition, for the first time, the EMNLP conference was held as a stand-alone anchor event with associated workshops.

In 2012, SIGDAT and SIGNLL organize the joint Conference of EMNLP and CoNLL at Jeju Island, Korea, July 12-14, collocated with ACL-2012. Jun'ichi Tsujii is the General Chair, James Henderson and Marius Pasca serve as the program co-chairs, Dary Deunbae Lee and Jong C Park are local arrangements chair and Naoaki Okazaki is the publication chair. There were 22 area chairs. Eric Xing and Patrick Pantel will present invited talks. 570 submissions were reviewed, and 139 papers were accepted (an overall rate of 24%). 99 papers (17%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 40 (7%) were accepted for poster presentation.

The election of SIGDAT officers was hold in the last quarter of 2011. The newly elected 2012 SIGDAT officers are:

President: Yuji Matsumoto Vice President: Eugene Charniak Vice President Elect: Philipp Koehn Secretary-Treasurer: Noah Smith

Other than those, there are 28 Advisory Committee Members.

Overall, SIGDAT has had a continuing history of organizational success, with six consecutive years of 400-650 submissions and 230-300+ attendees, suggesting the viability of SIGDAT continuing to organize off-phase and/or stand-alone EMNLP meetings in the future when the NLP conference calendar is relatively thin while helping to provide critical mass to collocated ACL conferences in very crowded years. We are now discussing the date and venue of 2013 conference and considering two possibilities, a stand-alone conference in the west coast of US or a collocated one with ACL-2013 in Sofia.