2014Q3 Reports: SIGFSM
Summary
SIGFSM [1] is actively meeting at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (next in 2015). This year (2014) we will hold the ACL workshop MORPHFSM [2] jointly with SIGMORPHON. Our main conference FSMNLP typically attracts 30-50 participants and is organized as a stand-alone conference at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques. The next location will be Düsseldorf, Germany in 2015.
We are still trying to grow SIGFSM into a more coherent and active community. We now publish proceedings of our events (FSMNLP 2011, 2012, 2013 and ATANLP 2010, 2012 and MORPHFSM 2014) in the ACL Anthology, but it remains a challenge (legal and otherwise) to import the proceedings of older workshops into the ACL Anthology. Our main conference FSMNLP is held biennally and we will consider running it as an ACL conference satellite event in order to make it more visible, to make it widely accessible (at lower cost), and to reduce the overhead work in workshop organization.
Membership
In 2014, the membership count of SIGFSM is slowly growing, but still below 100. We successfully managed to recruit new members at FSMNLP 2013 (July 15-17, 2013 in St. Andrews, Scotland) [3]. We will use all future meetings to actively recruit new members. Approx. 200 people currently receive the meeting announcements.
Officers
The term of the elected officers started on January 1, 2013 and is to end in 2014:
- Andreas Maletti (President)
- Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
- Måns Hulden (Secretary)
Other Positions:
- Liaison Representative at ACL 2014: Mans Hulden
- Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
- Web Site Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
- Web Content Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
SIGFSM Business Meeting and International Advisory Committee
The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) are nominated by the president and they continue to serve in this position until further notice.
- Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) — since 2010
- Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) — since 2012
- Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France) — since 2010
- Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA) — since 2010
- Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA) — since 2010
- András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary) — since 2010
- Marco Kuhlmann (Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Sweden) — since 2012
- Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
- Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
- Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands) — since 2010
- Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki, Finland) — since 2010
- Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) — since 2010
- Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA) — since 2010
- the elected officers
Events and Publications
FSMNLP
- FSMNLP 2015 will be organized by Laura Kallmeyer and will be held in Düsseldorf, Germany.
- FSMNLP 2013 [4] was held July 15-17, 2013 in St. Andrews, Scotland (UK). Alexander Clark (King's College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge) gave the keynote lectures. We have accepted 8 long and 9 short contributed papers for presentation. The proceedings were published in the ACL Anthology at [5]. Traditionally, locals introduce their research area in tutorials and we had 3 tutorials this time.
- FSMNLP 2012 [6] was held July 23-25, 2012 in Donostia (San Sebastian), Spain. Kimmo Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki, Finland) gave the invited talk. We accepted 7 long papers and 12 short papers for presentation and the final proceedings were published in the ACL Anthology at [7]. As usual, we had 3 tutorials introducing the local research to the community.
SIGFSM Business Meetings
- The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on July 16, 2013 in St. Andrews. The next FSMNLP (in 2015) was awarded to Laura Kallmeyer (Düsseldorf, Germany). The next business meeting will be held there.
- The joint workshop MORPHFSM between SIGFSM and SIGMORPHON was approved and will be held on June 27, 2014.
Elections
- The second SIGFSM elections were held in 2012. The current officers took over on January 1, 2013 and want to thank the previous officers for their dedicated service for SIGFSM.
Financial Report
SIGFSM only has a nominal amount of cash received from previous workshop organizers as surplus. Generally any surplus is used towards expenses of the invited speakers of later workshops.