2009Q3 Reports: SIGANN

SIGANN, the ACL Special Interest Group for ANNotation, 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 has 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). Approximately 200 people are on the SIGANN mailing list.

Elections will be held at the annual SIGANN meeting at the LAW in Singapore, in accordance with the SIGANN constitution requirement for elections every two years.

Two SIGANN working groups exist:

(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.

SIGANN officially organizes the Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW). The second LAW was held at LREC 2008 in Marrakech, where it was one of the most highly attended workshops affiliated with LREC. The meeting was held over 1 1/2 days, with the first half day devoted to working group reports and open discussion. The open discussion was highly successful and provided substantial community input for the development of best practices for annotation and provision of a forum for work on resource development.

The third LAW will be a two-day workshop held in Singapore in conjunction with ACL/IJCNLP 2009. We received 43 submissions to the workshop, and accepted 10 long papers, 12 short papers, and 15 posters. The poster session is new at LAW, in order to provide a forum for work that may not be at the cutting-edge, but which is nonetheless of interest to attendees.

SIGANN Officers:

President: Nancy Ide, Vassar College

Secretary: Adam Meyers, New York University

SIGANN Committee:

Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University / Academia Sinica)

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

Sameer Pradhan (BBN Technologies)

Manfred Stede (Universitat Potsdam)

Nianwen Xue (University of Colorado)