2014Q3 Reports: SIGANN

SIGANN, the ACL Special Interest Group for ANNotation, is an umbrella for research and activities associated with all aspects of the creation and use of linguistic annotations for language data, and is especially interested in fostering the identification of best practice guidelines for linguistic annotation.

SIGANN maintains a mailing list (sigann@cs.vassar.edu) to communicate with members, a web page (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/sigann), and a wiki (http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/wiki/corpuswg). Approximately 230 people are on the SIGANN mailing list.

The Seventh Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) was merged with Interoperability in Discourse. LAWVII & ID was a 1.5 day workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Program Committee chairs were Stefanie Dipper and Antonio Pareja-Lora. LAW VII & ID’s call for papers was answered by 48 submissions, of which 18 long papers, together with 10 additional papers that were presented as short talks and/or posters, were accepted. The program featured Chris Manning as an invited speaker on "Putting the linguistics back into linguistic annotation". Fifty-one people attended the workshop.

SIGANN Officers: President: Nancy Ide (Vassar College) Secretary: Adam Meyers (New York University) SIGANN Committee: Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University / Academia Sinica), Lori Levin (CMU), Antonio Pareja-Lora (SIC, UCM / OEG, UPM), Massimo Poesio (University of Trento), Sameer Pradhan (BBN Technologies), Manfred Stede (Universitat Potsdam), Katrin Tomanek (Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena), Fei Xia (University of Washington), Nianwen Xue (Brandeis University).

Elections for SIGANN officers will be announced this August at LAW VIII held in Dublin in conjunction with COLING, and elections will be held in September.