2012Q3 Reports: SIGLEX

The following SIGLEX board officers are serving until summer of 2013:

• President: Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country
• Secretary: Mona Diab, Columbia University

Information Officers:

• Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin
• Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne
• Anna Korhonen, University of Cambridge
• Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield

Board Member with Special Portfolio/Webmaster:

• Ken Litkowski, CL Research

Elections are planned in January 2013.

We currently have 491 members (46 new members in the last 12 months) and manage membership and mailing lists using the website developed and maintained by Ken Litkowski.

The shadow account has $9,548.05.

Suresh Manandhar and Deniz Yuret are organizing SemEval-2013, with at least 14 proposed tasks.

New Constitution, Sections

Following a request from the Multiword Expression community, SIGLEX changed its constitution to accommodate so-called Sections. Each Section will elect a representative in the SIGLEX board.

The change to the constitution was approved by the SIGLEX board, the ACL exec, and a poll among SIGLEX members (68 votes, incl. 4 no, 8 maybe and 54 yes). The new constitution is currently being implemented, with a new Section on MWE and a corresponding board member to be elected soon.

*SEM and SemEval

In the summer of 2011, the idea of having a joint conference covering two ACL Special Interest Groups, namely SIGLEX and SIGSEM, was born. The need for an umbrella conference to fight fragmentation on semantics was growing not only because of the many recent exciting developments in the field of computational linguistics, but also because of the growing number of shared tasks and workshops, of which many show points of contact with semantics in its various forms.

The proposal for the new conference received the support of the ACL and NAACL execs, the support from several workshop organizers (GEMS, RELMS, DISCO, MWE, RTE) and was sponsored by industry and academia (translated into financial support).

• General Chair: Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country)
• Program Committee Chairs: Johan Bos (University of Groningen), Mona Diab (Columbia University)
• For the first edition, NAACl in Montreal was chosen.
• See website and proceedings for more details.

• *SEM received 79 long and 29 short papers. Three long papers were withdrawn leaving 76 long papers. We accepted 21 long and 13 short papers. These numbers translate in acceptance rates of 27.6% (long) and 44.8% (short papers).

• *SEM hosts a shared task on Resolving the Scope and Focus of Negation, organized by Roser Morante and Eduardo Blanco. 10 teams participated, together submitting 14 runs. See website and proceedings for more details.

• In addition, *SEM hosted the last edition of SemEval, including 8 tasks and 56 participants. SemEval 2012 was organized by Suresh Manandhar and Deniz Yuret. See website and proceedings for more details.

Outlook: details for *SEM 2013 are being finalized, but the idea would be to collocate it with a major ACL conference. Given the overlap of interests with IWCS (March 19-22, Postdam, Germany) we are considering a venue in the summer and outside Europe. *SEM 2013 will again include a shared task and several Semeval 2013 tasks.

Events

SIGLEX organized and sponsored jointly with SIGSEM a new conference, *SEM (see summary above).

In addition SIGLEX endorsed the following events this year:

• 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis. Workshop at Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012-07-12, Jeju, Korea.

• Joint Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SP-Sem-MRL 2012). Workshop at Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012-07-12, Jeju, Republic of Korea.

• Sixth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST-6). Workshop at Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012-07-12, Jeju, Republic of Korea.

• Computational Linguistics Workshop on Austronesian Languages. Standalone workshop. 2012-07-02, Bali, Indonesia.