2008Q3 Reports: SIGWAC

SIGWAC report to ACL Board for year 2007-2008 Adam Kilgarriff (outgoing Chair) 29 April 2008

SIGWAC has had a successful year. In September 2007 it held a two-day workshop at Université Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, attended by thirty-two people. The workshop had two parts:

• a general workshop, chaired by Cédric Fairon and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver • the CLEANEVAL workshop, chaired by Marco Baroni, Serge Sharoff and Adam Kilgarriff.

The general workshop had eight papers including an invited speaker, Kevin Scannell. We are most grateful for ACL support for his travel.

CLEANEVAL was a competitive evaluation for taking arbitrary web pages and cleaning them up to give a useful linguistics corpus. It was conducted for two languages, English and Chinese. There were nine participating teams, from four continents and including students, academics and one company. A full report will be presented at LREC.

There will also be a fourth WAC workshop at LREC, June 1st 2008. There were fifteen submissions of which nine were selected for presentation.

An Advanced Course in Web as Corpus (ACWAC) is being planned for September 2008 in Brno, Czech Republic.

We have just completed the process of electing a new chair. As of May 2008, the chair is Serge Sharoff of Leeds Univ, UK.

Adam Kilgarriff (outgoing chair, 22 May 2008)

Addendum by Serge Sharoff (June 4, 2008):

The fourth WAC workshop happened as scheduled on June 1 after LREC and it was quite successful. The proceedings are available online at http://webascorpus.sf.net/WAC4/