2017Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

SIGFSM [1] is actively meeting at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (last in 2015; next September 4-6, 2017 in Umeå, Sweden). Our meetings typically attract 30-50 participants and are organized as satellite workshops of major meetings or stand-alone conferences. The premier conference FSMNLP is usually stand-alone and held at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques. In 2015 we met in Düsseldorf, Germany [2] and this year FSMNLP [3] will be held in Umeå, Sweden (September 4-6) organized by Frank Drewes. In 2016 we organized the ACL workshop on statistical NLP and weighted automata [4] and also endorsed the TAG+ workshop [5].

We continue trying to grow SIGFSM into a more active community. All recent event proceedings (FSMNLP 2011-2015, ATANLP 2010-2012, MORPHFSM 2014, and StatFSM 2016) have been published in the ACL Anthology. We also support the import of older proceedings, but we solely depend on the program committee chairs of those former conferences to supply the required information. We joined efforts this year with the TAG+ community to collocate our premier meetings and to foster more communication and collaboration between the two communities. Despite the current stand-alone nature of FSMNLP, we might consider running it as an ACL satellite event to make it more visible, to make it widely accessible at a lower cost, and to reduce the overhead work in organization.

Membership

In 2017, the membership count of SIGFSM is slowly growing, and is now at 105. We successfully managed to recruit a few new members at FSMNLP 2015 (June 22-24, 2015 in Düsseldorf, Germany) [6] and the ACL 2016 workshop [7]. We use our meetings to actively recruit new members and hope to attract a few new members at the next FSMNLP in September this year, which is collocated with the TAG+ workshop.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on January 1, 2013. They were all reelected in 2016, so their term is to end only in 2018:

Andreas Maletti (President)
Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
Måns Hulden (Secretary)

Other Positions:

Liaison Representative at ACL 2017: Anssi Yli-Jyrä
Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
Web Site Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
Web Content Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth

International Advisory Committee

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) are nominated by the president and they continue to serve in this position until further notice.

Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) — since 2010
Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) — since 2012
Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France) — since 2010
Laura Kallmeyer (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) — since 2015
Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA) — since 2010
Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA) — since 2010
András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary) — since 2010
Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK) — since 2015
Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany) — since 2015
Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands) — since 2010
Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki, Finland) — since 2010
Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) — since 2010
Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA) — since 2010
the elected officers

Events and Publications

FSMNLP

FSMNLP 2017 [8] will be held September 4-6, 2017 in Umeå, Sweden. Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK) and Gregory Kobele (University of Leipzig, Germany) will give the keynote lectures. As usual, there will be tutorials that introduce particular research areas.

StatFSM 2016 [9] was held on August 12, 2016 as an ACL workshop in Berlin, Germany. Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University, USA) gave a very inspiring keynote lecture and his presentation was succeeded by 9 contributed talks covering a variety of topics. More than 30 people attended the presentations, so overall the workshop was well received.

FSMNLP 2015 [10] was held June 22-24, 2015 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Sylvain Salvati (INRIA Bordeaux Sud-Ouest) and Andreas Maletti (University of Stuttgart) gave the keynote lectures. We accepted 12 contributions for presentation and for inclusion in the proceedings, which have been published in the ACL Anthology at [11]. Traditionally, tutorials introduce particular research areas, and we had 2 excellent tutorials presented by Mans Hulden and Ruben van de Vijver.

SIGFSM Business Meetings

The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on June 22, 2015 in Düsseldorf. Plans were made for future workshops (ACL workshop in 2016; FSMNLP 2017), additional advisory committee members (Laura Kallmeyer, Mark-Jan Nederhof, and Heiko Vogler), and other minor issues. All actions have been implemented. Unfortunately, Marco Kuhlmann requested to leave the board effective in 2015.

The next business meeting will be held on September 5, 2017 at FSMNLP im Umeå, Sweden.

Elections

The third SIGFSM elections were concluded in 2016. The current officers, who took over on January 1, 2013, were relected and will thus remain in office until the end of 2018. The next elections are scheduled for 2018 (typically starting in autumn).

Financial Report

SIGFSM currently only has a nominal amount of cash received from previous workshop organizers as surplus. Generally any surplus is used towards website maintenance fees and expenses of the invited speakers of workshops.

Previous Reports

[12] 2009 [13] 2010 [14] 2011 [15] 2012 [16] 2013 [17] 2014 [18] 2015 [19] 2016