2015Q3 Reports: SIGWAC

General

The Special Interest Group on the Web as Corpus (SIGWAC) has 175 members as of 30 June 2015 (based on subscriptions to the SIGWAC mailing list).

The SIGWAC community keeps in touch through a mailing list (http://devel.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/sigwac) and the SIGWAC home page (http://sigwac.org.uk/).

The SIGWAC board

Elections were held in July 2012. There were only two nominations for the two vacant positions, who were thus elected unopposed.

• Chair: Stefan Evert (http://www.stefan-evert.de/)
  Professor of Corpus Linguistics, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Secretary: Egon W. Stemle (http://www.eurac.edu/staff/estemle/)
  Researcher at European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano

The current board serves from 1 Aug 2012 to 31 July 2015.

Elections 2015

A new SIGWAC board will be elected in July 2015. As of this writing, a call for nominations has just been sent out over the SIGWAC mailing list. The election procedure is scheduled to start on 31 July 2015.

WAC Meeting 2015

SIGWAC intended to organize the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop on 10 August 2015 at eLex 2015 (Herstmonceux Castle, UK). Due to an insufficient number of submissions meeting the quality standards of the SIGWAC community, the workshop had to be cancelled. We believe that this is due to the venue chosen for the workshop: eLex seems to attract many users of Web corpora rather than the developers and corpus compilers who would usually submit a paper to a WAC workshop. The most striking evidence for this conclusion is that even before the early bird deadline, 29 conference delegates had already registered for the workshop (excluding organizers and authors of submitted papers).

For these reasons, WAC-10 will be replaced by an informal Web as Corpus Meeting convened by Egon Stemle (EURAC Bozen/Bolzano) with a focus on the experiences of users, their requirements, and future directions for Web as Corpus development.

Events planned for 2016

SIGWAC intends to organize the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-10) in 2016, co-located with one of the major computational linguistics conferences (ACL, LREC, etc.). Organizers, schedule and details are to be confirmed.

The SIGWAC community is also interested in a new shared task on pre-processing and annotation of Web corpora, following up on the successful CLEANEVAL competition in 2007. As a first step, SIGWAC endorses the EmpiriST Shared Task on tokenization and POS tagging of German CMC and Web data organized by the Empirikom research network in 2016, which will be integrated into the WAC-10 Workshop.