2016Q3 Reports: SIGHAN

SIGHAN Officers

The SIGHAN officers serve from April 15, 2016 until April 14, 2018. The current board consists of:

       • Chair -- Min ZHANG  (Soochow University)
       • Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect        -- Nianwen XUE	(Brandeis University)
       • Treasurer     -- SUN Le  (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
       • Secretary/Web Master -- Gina-Anne LEVOW       (University of Washington)

Events

The main action for the SIGHAN community last year was the Eighth SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing. The workshop was held on July 30-31, 2015 in Beijing, China in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2015. The workshop was co-organized by Liang-Chih Yu, Yuan Ze University; Zhifang Sui, Peking University; Yue Zhang, Singapore University of Technology and Design; and Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas. The workshop also featured two Bakeoff tasks: Chinese Spell Checking and Topic-based Chinese Message Polarity Classification.

In addition, elections were held to select the officers of the SIGHAN board as well as information officers. The elections were completed in April 2016, and the new members of the board have taken up their responsibilties, thanking outgoing Chair Chengqing ZONG for his leadership.

Plans

We are now preparing for the Fourth CIPS-SIGHAN Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing to be held in late 2016. The conference will feature high quality papers in all aspects of Chinese language processing. The conference organizing committee includes Min Zhang (Soochow University), Le Sun (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Chengqing Zong (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences).