2016Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV

Summary

The purpose of SIGSLAV (the ACL Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing) established in December 2014 is to stimulate research in NLP and creation of linguistic resources for the Slavic languages. The SIGSLAV web page located at: http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi maintained by Lidia Pivovarova and Roman Yangarber remains an important source of up-to-date information on relevant events and activities.

As of 2016 SIGSLAV is meeting at its main workshop BSNLP (Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing) , which is held biennally (last in 2015; next in 2017). Our meetings typically attract 30-40 participants and are organized as co-located workshops of major conferences in the area of NLP and computational linguistics. The last one (5th edition) was held in Hissar (Bulgaria) on 10-11 September 2015.

We are still in the process of elaborating strategies to grow SIGSLAV into a more active community, in particular as regards coordinating efforts related to organisation and SIGSLAV-sponsoring of other scientific events that are relevant to Slavic NLP. To facilitate this task an Advisory Board has been established in 2015. It is also important to emphasize that support from ACL is of paramount importance for SIGSLAV in the context of acknowledging that BSNLP is currently the flagship workshop of the SIG.