2014Q3 Reports: SIGMOL

SIGMOL is the special interest group on mathematics of language, which refers to the study of mathematical structures and methods that are of importance to the study of language.

Activities

Biennial Meeting

The main activity of the SIG is the organization of the biennial meeting “Mathematics of Language (MoL)”. The previous meeting, MoL 13, was held as a workshop in connection with ACL 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The workshop had 15 registered participants, although the number of attendants was considerably higher, especially during the invited talk, which was given by Mark Johnson. For the first time, the proceedings of MoL have been made available in the ACL Anthology (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/sigmol.html). The next meeting, MoL 14, will be held in 2015. The location and date of that meeting will be determined during the fall of 2014.

Kuroda Prize

At ACL 2013, András Kornai, James Rogers, Gerald Penn, and Anssi Yli-Jyrä gave a SIG-endorsed full-day tutorial on “The Mathematics of Language Learning”. They decided to donate part of their remuneration for that tutorial to found a prize that commemorates “lasting contributions to the mathematics of language”, and to award the prize, which they named after S.-Y. Kuroda, to Aravind K. Joshi, Vijay K. Shanker, and David Weir (award statement). The award was presented in January 2014 during a (SIG-endorsed) Special Session on Mathematical Theories of Natural Language Processing, which was held as part of the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics (ISAIM).

Future Kuroda prizes will be awarded by the SIG, which has adopted a by-law with rules and regulations that control the award procedure.

Members and Officers

As of 2014-05-09 SIGMOL has 255 registered members. Its current officers are president Marco Kuhlmann (Linköping University, Sweden) and vice president Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics, Japan). Their terms end at the next business meeting of the SIG, which will be held in connection with MoL 14. At this time the vice president takes over the duties of the president, and the outgoing president takes over the duties of the vice president, until a new vice president will be elected at the end of 2015/beginning of 2016.

Marco Kuhlmann, 2014-05-09