2020Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

SIGFSM is actively meeting at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (last in 2019 in Dresden, Germany; next in 2021 in Stellenbosch, South Africa). Our meetings typically attract 30-50 participants and are organized as satellite workshops of major meetings or stand-alone conferences. The premier conference FSMNLP is usually stand-alone and held at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques. In 2019 we met in Dresden, Germany (September 23-25) under the auspices of Heiko Vogler and next year we will meet in Stellenbosch, South Africa under the auspices of Bruce Watson. It is currently planned to co-locate FSMNLP 2021 with similar theory-oriented NLP-conferences and workshops.

We continue growing SIGFSM into a more active community. All recent event proceedings (FSMNLP 2011-2019, ATANLP 2010-2012, MORPHFSM 2014, and StatFSM 2016) have been published in the ACL Anthology. We also support the import of older proceedings, but we solely depend on the program committee chairs of those former conferences to supply the required information. We joined efforts with the TAG+ community to collocate our premier meetings (as evidenced by the joint meeting in 2017) and to foster more communication and collaboration between the two communities. Despite the current stand-alone nature of FSMNLP, we might consider running it as an ACL satellite event to make it more visible, to make it widely accessible at a lower cost, and to reduce the overhead work in organization.

Membership

In 2020, the membership count of SIGFSM has increased to 129. We successfully managed to recruit new members at FSMNLP 2019 (September 23-25, 2019 in Dresden, Germany). We use our meetings to actively recruit new members and hope to attract new members at the next FSMNLP in 2021.

Officers

The term of the previously elected officers ends on July 31, 2020. We sincerely thank Måns Hulden (past secretary) and Thomas Hanneforth (past treasurer) for their 8-year service. The 2020 election concluded and the newly elected officers listed below will start their 3-year term on August 1, 2020.

• Andreas Maletti (President)
• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (Treasurer)
• Bruce W. Watson (Secretary)

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative at ACL 2020: none
• Email List Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä
• Web Site Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä
• Web Content Resource Manager: Anssi Yli-Jyrä

International Advisory Committee

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) are nominated by the president and they continue to serve in this position until further notice.

• Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) — since 2010
• Frank Drewes (Umeå University, Sweden) — since 2017
• Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) — since 2012
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France) — since 2010
• Laura Kallmeyer (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) — since 2015
• Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA) — since 2010
• Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA) — since 2010
• András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary) — since 2010
• Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK) — since 2015
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
• Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
• Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany) — since 2015
• Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands) — since 2010
• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki, Finland) — since 2010
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) — since 2010
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA) — since 2010
• the elected officers

Events and Publications

FSMNLP

• FSMNLP 2019 was held September 23-25, 2019 in Dresden, Germany. Frank Drewes (Umeå University, Sweden) and Kilian Gebhardt (University of Technology Dresden, Germany) gave the keynote lectures. Frank reported on "Recent Advances in Efficient Parsing for Graph Grammars" and Kilian spoke about "Latent Variable Grammars for Discontinuous Parsing". As usual, there was a tutorial that introduced a particular research area. More precisely, Aarne Ranta (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) introduced "Grammatical Framework: an Interlingual Grammar Formalism".

SIGFSM Business Meetings

• The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on September 24, 2019 at FSMNLP in Dresden, Germany.
• The next business meeting will be held in 2021 at FSMNLP in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Elections

• The fourth SIGFSM elections concluded and the 3-year term of the elected officers starts on August 1, 2020. The next elections are thus to be held in 2023.

Financial Report

SIGFSM has no savings worth mentioning. All meetings are organized with local funds or funds collected during registration. Indeed it is planned to discuss the further need for a SIGFSM treasurer with the membership at the next business meeting in 2021.

Previous Reports

[1] 2009 [2] 2010 [3] 2011 [4] 2012 [5] 2013 [6] 2014 [7] 2015 [8] 2016 [9] 2017 [10] 2018 [11] 2019