2008Q3 Reports: SIGANN

SIGANN, the ACL Special Interest Group for ANNotation, was approved as a new SIG at last year’s ACL Executive meeting in Prague. The SIG is an umbrella for research and activities associated with all aspects of the creation and use of linguistic annotations for language data, and is especially interested in fostering the identification of best practice guidelines for linguistic annotation.

SIGANN was inaugurated at the first Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW), was held in conjuction with ACL 2008 in Prague. At that meeting, over 200 people signed up as members of the SIG. SIGANN now officially organizes the LAW, the second of which was held at LREC 2008 in Marrakech.

SIGANN has established a mailing list (sigann@cs.vassar.edu) to communicate with members, a web page (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/ sigann), and a wiki (http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/wiki/corpuswg).

Two working groups have so far been established:

(1) Corpus Working Group: This group has identified and made available a small (40K) corpus representing several genres of written and spoken text, drawn from the Open American National Corpus (OANC) and therefore freely redistributable and reusable. The group is sponsoring a “shared corpus task†by calling for researchers to annotate the corpus for any phenomenon of interest, in any format, and to contribute the annotations to SIGANN. All of the annotations will be made freely available via the SIGANN site. The corpus was strategically identified so that it is part of the data being annotated by existing projects, including the ULA and ANC MASC, thereby ensuring that a base of annotations for the data exist.

(2) Best Practices working group: This group was established to begin work on the identification of best practices for linguistic annotation. The group’s first (basic) report will be published this summer, after input is gathered at the annual SIGANN meeting at the LAW in May, 2008 in Marrakech.

SIGANN Officers:

President: Nancy Ide, Vassar College

Secretary: Adam Meyers, New York University

SIGANN Committee:

Inderjeet Mani (MITRE Corporation)

Antonio Pareja-Lora (SIC, UCM / OEG, UPM)

Sameer Pradhan (BBN Technologies)

Manfred Stede (Universitat Potsdam)

Nianwen Xue (University of Colorado)

The 2nd LAW was one of the most highly attended workshops at LREC. The 3rd LAW is currently planned to be held at ACL 2009 in Singapore, possibly in conjunction with CONLL.