2022Q3 Reports: SIGTURK

2022Q3 Reports: SIGTURK

SIGTURK is the ACL Special Interest Group on Turkic Languages. SIGTURK aims to foster a collaborative, diverse, inclusive, and responsible environment bringing together enthusiasts of Turkic languages to stimulate comprehensive, interoperable, modular, and reusable work that provides utility and leads to state-of-the-art research in computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Membership

The official establishment of SIGTURK is on April 12, 2022. As of July 6, 2022, SIGTURK has 38 members.

Board

As of July 6, 2022, SIGTURK does not have a formally-elected board. Assuming officers are:

• President: Duygu Ataman, New York University, USA
• Secretary: Sardana Ivanova, University of Helsinki, Finland

Our members that made code contributions to SIGTURK repositories during this year, sorted by the number of commits across the repositories:

• Mehmet Oguz Derin @mehmetoguzderin
• Jonne Sälevä @j0ma
• Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov @mirzakhalov

Elections

SIGTURK plans the first formal elections to take place in Autumn 2022.

Activities

Core Specification

To realize the vision of SIGTURK and to break the boundary of timezones that sync meetings require, SIGTURK authors an informative Core specification that defines a process and a set of guidelines to serve as many people as possible. SIGTURK Core is at https://sigturk.github.io/sigturk.

SIGTURK Core takes care of a few aspects:

• Defines a workflow to provide an open, ticket-traceable way to inquiry and contribute to the activities of SIGTURK,
• Aims to define conduct that allows the SIGTURK to contain alternative perspectives (such as consonant inventory of the proto-Language),
• Provides tooling guidelines to avoid common pitfalls such as non-normalized sources (by CI-checking NFKC sources).

Meetings

As defined by SIGTURK Core, the informal meetings take place on the Jitsi platform every Wednesday at 12 PM Eastern Time.

Communications

Website

SIGTURK website is at https://sigturk.github.io.

Mailing List

SIGTURK members get up-to-date information from the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/g/sigturk.

Future

Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages

SIGTURK plans to host a Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages.

Business Meetings

SIGTURK plans to host an in-person business meeting alongside the planned workshop.

International Advisory Committee

SIGTURK plans to invite members from the scientific community or language or technology experts to serve on the international advisory committee.