2020Q3 Reports: SIGLEX

The following SIGLEX Executive Board officers are serving until Spring 2022:

President

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar

Secretary

Aline Villavicencio, The University of Sheffield, UK

Executive Board

Vice-President Elect: Steven Bethard, The University of Arizona, USA

Vice-Secretary Elect: Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

SIGLEX Section Representatives on the Executive Board

MWE section: Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University, France

SemEval section: David Jurgens, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

We currently have 852 members and we manage membership and mailing lists using the website that was developed by Ken Litkowski and is now managed by Preslav Nakov.

SIGLEX has two sections:

Multiword Expressions (MWE) with 205 members. SemEval with 982 members.

SIGLEX (co-)organises three yearly events: SemEval, *SEM, and MWE:

SEM 2019

The Eight Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (* SEM 2019), jointly organised by SIGLEX and SIGSEM, was co-located with NAACL-HLT’2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) and took place in June 2019.

Organizers:

General Chair - Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Programme Co-chairs - Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam and Lun-Wei Ku, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Publication Chair - Kilian Evang, University of Düsseldorf

Publicity Chair - Soujanya Poria, Nanyang Technological University

Area Chairs:

Lexical semantics and word representations: Anna Feldman, Montclair State University

Lexical semantics and word representations: Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Rome Tor Vergata

Semantic composition and sentence representations: Helen Yannakoudakis, University of Cambridge

Semantic composition and sentence representations: Douwe Kiela, Facebook AI Research

Discourse, dialogue and generation: Lea Frermann, Amazon Core AI

Discourse, dialogue and generation: Lu Wang, Northeastern University

Machine learning for semantic tasks: Roi Reichart, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Machine learning for semantic tasks: Wilker Aziz, University of Amsterdam

Multidisciplinary & COI: Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU

Multilinguality: Marianna Apidianaki, CNRS

Human semantic processing / Psycholinguistics: Barry Devereux, Queen’s University Belfast

Semantics in NLP applications: Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University

Semantics in NLP applications: Saif Mohammad, National Research Council of Canada

Semantics in NLP applications: Marek Rei, University of Cambridge

Resources and evaluation: Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service

Theoretical and formal semantics: Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London

Submissions: 96 papers were submitted. Out of these, 36 papers were accepted (19 long, 13 short). The final overall acceptance rate was 33%. The final number of papers in the program is 36 (19 long, 13 short).

SemEval 2019

The SIGLEX flagship event took place in coordination with NAACL 2019 and *SEM 2019.

Organizers:

Jonathan May, ISI, University of Southern California

Ekaterina Shutova, University of Amsterdam

Aurelie Herbelot, University of Trento

Xiaodan Zhu, Queen's University

Marianna Apidianaki, CNRS

Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada

SemEval 2019 included the following 11 shared tasks organized in five tracks:

Frame semantics and semantic parsing

Task 1: Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing with UCCA

Task 2: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Frame Induction

Opinion, emotion and abusive language detection

Task 3: EmoContext: Contextual Emotion Detection in Text

Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection

Task 5: HatEval: Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter

Task 6: OffensEval: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media

Fact vs fiction

Task 7: RumourEval 2019: Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours

Task 8: Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums

Information extraction and question answering

Task 9: Suggestion Mining from Online Reviews and Forums

Task 10: Math Question Answering

NLP for scientific applications

Task 12: Toponym Resolution in Scientific Papers

The proceedings contain both Task Description papers that describe each of the above tasks, and System Description papers that present the systems that participated in these tasks. A total of 11 task description papers and 223 system description papers are included in the proceedings.

SemEval 2020

32 task proposals were received and reviewed by 68 external reviewers from the ACL community. 12 of the tasks were selected for SemEval 2020. For more details about the event, check out http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2020/

MWE-WN 2019

The 15th edition of the yearly flagship event of the MWE Section, called Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE), was co-located with the ACL 2019 conference in Florence, Italy. In a quest for synergies with related communities, the Section joined forces with the Global Wordnet Association (GWA). Thus, the event was called Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019).

Invited talk: "When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: Multiword expressions and idiomaticity", by Aline Villavicencio, University of Essex (UK) and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)

Submissions: 37 papers (20 long and 17 short) were submitted. 12 long papers and 8 short ones were selected. 6 papers (1 short and 5 long) were selected as oral presentations and 14 (7 short and 7 long) as posters. The overall acceptance rate was 54%.

Proceedings: to appear in the ACL Anthology.

Community discussion: it will include feedback from this joint event, MWE-related announcements, announcements about the SIGLEX-MWE Steering Committee recruitment, plans for future shared task editions and for collaboration between the Universal Dependencies and the PARSEME communities.

SIGLEX Endorsed Events in 2019:

EUROPHRAS'2019: http://www.lexytrad.es/europhras2019/

MUMTTT'2019: http://www.lexytrad.es/europhras2019/