2016Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV

Summary

The purpose of SIGSLAV (the ACL Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing) established in December 2014 is to stimulate research in NLP and creation of linguistic resources for the Slavic languages. The SIGSLAV web page located at: http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi maintained by Lidia Pivovarova and Roman Yangarber remains an important source of up-to-date information on relevant events and activities.

As of 2016 SIGSLAV is meeting at its main workshop BSNLP (Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing). Baltic languages are included therein for historical reasons (the first BSNLP workshop took place in 2007 as a co-located event of ACL 2015) and also due to certain relatedness to Slavic languages. BSNLP is held biennally (last in 2015; next in 2017). Our meetings typically attract 30-40 participants and are organized as co-located workshops of major conferences in the area of NLP and computational linguistics. The last one (5th edition) was held in Hissar (Bulgaria) on 10-11 September 2015.

We are still in the process of elaborating strategies to grow SIGSLAV into a more active community, in particular as regards coordinating efforts related to organisation and SIGSLAV-sponsoring of other scientific events that are relevant to Slavic NLP. To facilitate this task an Advisory Board has been established in 2015. It is also important to emphasize that support from ACL is of paramount importance for SIGSLAV in the context of acknowledging that BSNLP is currently the flagship workshop of the SIG.

Membership

Since the establishment of SIGSLAV in 2014, the membership count of the SIG grew to 102 as of June 2016. In particular, BSNLP 2015 workshop in 2015 held on 10-11 September 2015 in Hissar in Bulgaria facilitated recruitment of many new members. We intend to use SIGSLAV-sponsored events to actively recruit new members.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on 1 December 2014:

Chair: Jakub Piskorski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw & Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
Vice-Chair: Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland
Secretary: Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Resource Manager: Lidia Pivovarova, University of Helsinki, Finland
Resource Manager: Hristo Tanev, Joint Research Centre, European Commission

Advisory Board

The members of the Advisory Board are nominated by the SIGSLAV chair and they continue to serve in this position until further notice.

Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Natalia Grabar, Université Lille 3, France
Cvetana Krstev, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Vladislav Kuboň, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
Adam Przepiórkowski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Marko Tadić, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria

Events and Publications

BSNLP

BSNLP 2015 (http://bsnlp-2015.cs.helsinki.fi) was held on 10-11 September 2015 in Hissar, Bulgaria as a workshop co-located with RANLP 2015 conference. Josef Steinberger (University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic, and SentiSquare s.r.o.) and Tanja Samardžić (University of Zurich) gave the keynote talks. Of the submitted 24 papers and 5 interactive presentations, 13 papers and 3 presentations were accepted (overall acceptance rate: 55%). The proceedings of BSNLP 2015 were published in the ACL Anthology at http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W15/#5300. In addition, general ideas on future SIGSLAV activities and initiatives were discussed with workshop participants.

SIGSLAV Business Meetings

The last SIGSLAV business meeting was held on 11 September 2015 in Hissar (Bulgaria). Plans were discussed on future activities, advisory committee members, and general strategy on engaging Slavic NLP community in coordinating efforts related to organization of scientific events related to Slavic NLP. They will be implemented in the coming months.
The next business meeting will be held at BSNLP 2017 (date/venue yet to be decided)

Elections

The first SIGSLAV elections will be organized in late autumn 2016. The current officers took over on 1 December 2014 and will remain in office until the end of 2016.

Financial Report

SIGSLAV does not have any financial resources at the moment.