2013Q3 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 on its way, and planned to finish by the end of August.

We currently have 550 members (59 new members in the last 12 months) and manage membership and mailing lists using the website developed and maintained by Ken Litkowski.

SIGLEX has one Section on Multiword Entities, which has currently 113 members.

The shadow account has $8700, but his does not include the expenses in 2013, nor the potential surpluses from *SEM and SemEval in 2012 and 2013.

*SEM

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.

In 2013 we had the Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2013), collocated with NAACL HLT 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It took two days.

• Mona Diab (The George Washington University, General Chair)
• Timothy Baldwin (The University of Mebourne, Program Committee Co-Chair)
• Marco Baroni (University of Trento, Program Committee Co-Chair)
• See [1] for more details.

• *SEM received 45 submissions. 14 papers (11 long and 3 short) were accepted (31% acceptance rate).
• The registration included both *SEM and SemEval, getting 150+ registered participants overall.
• *SEM hosts a shared task selected by a program committee. This year the task was on Semantic Textual Similarity, with 34 teams

participating, submitting a total of 103 system runs.

Outlook: details for *SEM 2014 are being finalized, but the idea would be to collocate it with a major ACL or ICCL conference.

SemEval

We also had SemEval-2013 : Semantic Evaluation Exercises (International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation), collocated with NAACL HLT 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It took two days, one of them overlapped with *SEM.

• Suresh Manandhar (York University, co-organizer)
• Deniz Yuret (Koc University, co-organizer)
• See [2] for more details.

• About 100 teams submitted more than 300 systems for the 12 tasks of SemEval-2013. A total of 12 task description

papers and 101 system description papers are included in the procceedings.

Outlook: A poll on future configurations of Semeval is currently being hold. The SIGLEX board will decide accordingly about future SemEvals.

Events

SIGLEX organized and sponsored SemEval and, jointly with SIGSEM, *SEM (see above)

In addition SIGLEX endorsed the following events this year:

• The 1st Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation. Workshop at NAACL HLT 2013, 2013-06-14, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
• The 9th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2013). Workshop at NAACL HLT 2013, 2013-06-13, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
• Seventh Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST-7). Workshop at NAACL HLT 2013, 2013-06-13, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
• Joint Symposium on Semantic Processing: Textual Inference and Structures in Corpora. At FBK, Trento (Italy), November 20-22, 2013. http://jssp2013.fbk.eu/