2016Q3 Reports: SIGMOL

SIGMOL is the special interest group on mathematics of language, which refers to the study of mathematical structures and methods that are of importance to the study of language.

Activities

Biennial Meeting

The main activity of the SIG is the organization of the biennial meeting “Mathematics of Language (MoL)”. The previous meeting, MoL 14, was held as a satellite event of the 2015 Linguistic Summer Institute in Chicago July 25–26 (https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mol2015/); the local organizer was Greg Kobele. The meeting received 22 submissions, 12 of which were accepted for presentation. One accepted paper was subsequently retracted. The proceedings of the meeting, which included two papers by the invited speakers, was published in the ACL Anthology. The next meeting, MoL 15, is planned in London sometime in the spring of 2017. The precise dates will be determined by the end of the summer 2016. The local organizers will be Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Dimitrios Kartsaklis, and Matthew Purver of Queen Mary University of London.

Kuroda Prize

The SIG awards the S.-Y. Kuroda Prize for lasting contributions to the mathematics of language. The award process is controlled by a SIG by-law. The 2015 prize was awarded to Edward L. Keenan of UCLA (http://www.molweb.org/award-2015.html). The award ceremony was held during MoL 14.

Members and Officers

As of 2016-07-11 SIGMOL has 282 registered members. Its current officers are president Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics, Japan) and vice president Philippe de Groote (INRIA Nancy, France). Their terms end at the next business meeting of the SIG, which will be held in connection with MoL 15. At this time the vice president will take over the duties of the president, and the outgoing president will take over the duties of the vice president, until a new vice president is elected at the end of 2017/beginning of 2018.

Makoto Kanazawa, 2016-07-11