2012Q3 Reports: SIGWAC

SIGWAC entered another year. The workshop in 2011 was a joint event with the Building and Using Comparable Corpora Workshop, which was held at ACL in Portland in June 2011. Kevin Knight (ISI, Univ of Southern California) was the invited speaker and this brought a surge of participants for the talk, more than 60. The regular papers were attended by about 20 participants.

The next workshop was co-located with WWW2012, April 2012. If computational linguistics is the parent discipline for this SIG, then web research, as identified by the WWW conference, is the uncle who we don't see so often, but of whom we hear tales of travels and adventures and fortunes gained and lost, temples bedecked with gold and jewels but also dragons' dens. In this workshop we have met the uncle and learned more about the WWW community. We had about 20 participants at this workshop.

The next workshop will be co-located with the Corpus Linguistics Conference, which was the launchpad for the very first WAC workshop in 2005, before formation of the SIG in 2006. In the next few weeks there will be also a re-election for the Chair and Secretary of this SIG.