2018Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV

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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 is located at http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi. SIGSLAV had 124 members as of April 2018, who are notified about the activities of the SIG through its mailing list sigslav@googlegroups.com.

Officers

The first SIGSLAV elections were held in October 2017. The call for nominations was sent out in May 2017. The previous officers started their term on December 1, 2014 and remained in office until the end of 2017.

The following new officer were elected by the SIGSLAV members to serve on the SIGSLAV board:

  • Chair: Tomaž Erjavec (tomaz.erjavec@ijs.si), Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Vice-Chair: Roman Yangarber (roman.yangarber@cs.helsinki.fi), University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Secretary: Preslav Nakov (pnakov@qf.org.qa), Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar
  • Resource Manager: Lidia Pivovarova (pivovaro@cs.helsinki.fi), University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Resource Manager: Josef Steinberger (jstein@kiv.zcu.cz), University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
  • Interim Resource Manager: Michał Marcińczuk (michal.marcinczuk@pwr.edu.pl), Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland.

The new Interim Resource Manager, Michał Marcińczuk, was elected by the other officers of SIGLSLAV, also to help with the preparation of the SIGSLAV shared NER task.

The new officers thank the previous ones for their work on founding and running SIGSLAV.

The 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. In the reporting period, a new member, Katerina Zdravkova from Skopje (Republic of Macedonia) was voted to the Advisory Board, partly due to the fact that Tomaž Erjavec, who was previously a member, took up his duties as the chair of SIGSLAV, and partly so that the Advisory board includes a member from one more Slavic language. Furthermore, two former officers, Jakub Piskorski and Jan Šnajder, were voted into the Advisory Board.

The advisory board currently includes:

  • Natalia Grabar (natalia.grabar@univ-lille3.fr) , Université Lille 3, France
  • Cvetana Krstev (cvetana@poincare.matf.bg.ac.rs), University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Vladislav Kuboň (vk@ufal.mff.cuni.cz), Charles University, Czech Republic
  • Jakub Piskorski (jpiskorski@gmail.com), Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw & Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
  • Adam Przepiórkowski (adamp@ipipan.waw.pl), Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
  • Serge Sharoff (s.sharoff@leeds.ac.uk), University of Leeds, United Kingdom
  • Kiril Simov (kivs@bultreebank.org), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
  • Marko Tadić (marko.tadic@ffzg.hr), University of Zagreb, Croatia
  • Jan Šnajder (jan.snajder@fer.hr), University of Zagreb, Croatia
  • Katerina Zdravkova (katerina.zdravkova@finki.ukim.mk), Ss. Cyril and Methodius University Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

As required by the constitution of SIGSLAV, the officers and advisory board members cover a large number of Slavic languages, i.e., Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovenian.

Events and Publications

In keeping with the tradition begun in 2007, in 2017 SIGSLAV organised the sixth bi-ennial Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing (Baltic languages are included for historical reasons (the first BSNLP workshop took place in 2007 co-located with ACL) and due to their relatedness to Slavic languages.) Workshop (http://bsnlp-2017.cs.helsinki.fi/). The 6th BSNLP was colocated with EACL and was held in Valencia (Spain) on April 4, 2017. Serge Sharoff from the University of Leeds (UK) gave the keynote talk. The workshop received 24 submissions, 14 of which were accepted for presentation (58% acceptance rate). The proceedings of BSNLP 2017 were published in the ACL Anthology ( https://aclweb.org/anthology/sigslav.html#2017_0). The presentations covered 10 Balto-Slavic languages: Croatian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Rusyn, Slovene, Serbian (through the regular Workshop papers), and additionally Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian (via the Shared Task Challenge, cf. below).

In 2017, SIGSLAV also organized its first shared task (as part of the BSNLP workshop), on multilingual named entity recognition (http://bsnlp-2017.cs.helsinki.fi/shared_task.html). For this, a dataset covering seven Slavic languages was built, which allowed systems to be evaluated on recognizing mentions of named entities in Web documents, their normalization/lemmatization, and cross-lingual matching. Four systems were evaluated in the context of the shared task, and two of them, in addition to the overview of the shared task, were presented in the BSLNP’2017 proceedings.

SIGSLAV also sponsored RUSSE’2018, the Shared Task on Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation for the Russian Language (http://russe.nlpub.org/2018/wsi/), with the first call for participation on October 15, 2017. The results were published on February 15, 2018 and then discussed in the scope of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, Dialogue’2018 (http://www.dialog-21.ru/en/).

The next BSNLP Workshop will take place in 2019 and a call for organising it will go out shortly. We also plan to have the second edition of the multilingual named entity recognition shared task in conjunction with BSNLP’2019.

SIGSLAV would also like to suggest that in the process of evaluation of Workshop proposals for ACL conferences, an important criterion should be not to co-locate workshops with similar topics, as each individually gets less publications than they would have otherwise.

SIGSLAV Business Meetings

  • The last SIGSLAV business meeting was held on April 5, 2017 in Valencia (Spain). Plans were discussed on a general strategy for engaging the Slavic NLP community in coordinating efforts on the organization of scientific events related to Slavic NLP, follow-up to the shared task, and the preparation of the SIGSLAV elections in 2017.
  • The next business meeting will be held at BSNLP’2019.

Financial Report

SIGSLAV has no financial resources.

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