2018Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

SIGFSM is actively meeting at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (last in 2017; next September 23-25, 2019 in Dresden, Germany; 2021 in Stellenbosch, South Africa). 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. Last year we met in Umeå, Sweden (September 4-6) organized by Frank Drewes and next year we will meet in Dresden, Germany (September 23-25) organized by Heiko Vogler. The location of the 2021 meeting will be Stellenbosch, South Africa. Last year's TAG+ workshop took place jointly with FSMNLP 2017 and was endorsed by us.

We continue trying to grow SIGFSM into a more active community. All recent event proceedings (FSMNLP 2011-2017, 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 with the TAG+ community to collocate our premier meetings (as evidenced by the joint meeting in 2017) 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 2018, the membership count of SIGFSM is stable at 105. We successfully managed to recruit a few new members at FSMNLP 2017 (September 4-6, 2017 in Umeå, Sweden). We use our meetings to actively recruit new members and hope to attract a few new members at the next FSMNLP in September next year.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on January 1, 2013. They were all reelected for another term starting January 1, 2016, so their current term is to end at the end of this year:

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

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative at ACL 2018: none
• 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
• Frank Drewes (Umeå University, Sweden) — since 2017
• 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.