2010Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

The current membership count of SIGFSM is 57 members.

The nominations (April 9 - May 9, 2010) for the elections (May 10 – July 10, 2010) provided only one candidate for each position and the results were thus immediately available and were announced on May 11, 2010. The former de factor officers became elected officers:

• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (President)
• Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
• Laurette Pretorius (Secretary)

The first business meeting of SIGFSM was held during the FSMNLP 2009 workshop on July 22, 2009, at the University of Pretoria. During the business meeting, the SIGFSM constitution was accepted. A list of candidates for nominations for IAC was discussed. After the meeting, the International Advisory Committee (IAC), was nominated by the President:

• Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France)
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France)
• Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA)
• András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary)
• Andreas Maletti (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain)
• Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Nertherlands)
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA)
• the elected officers

In 2009, SIGFSM and SIGMORPHON were mutually in contact concerning plans for a joint workshop. However, SIGFSM could not provide volunteers to help in organizing a workshop during 2010. Besides this, the IAC of SIGFSM has specifically endorsed the following events:

• FSMNLP 2009, July 21-24, 2009 in the University of Pretoria, South Africa
• FSMNLP 2011 is collocated with CIAA 2011 in Blois, France
• An ACL 2010 workshop: Applications of Tree Automata in Natural Language Processing in Uppsala, Sweden

In addition, a special journal issue _Finite State Methods and Models in Natural Language Processing_ in Natural Language Engineering has been organized.

Open positions:

• Web Master
• Liaison Representative

Plans including a web site, a proceedings archive and future publication policies were discussed in the SIGFSM meeting. András Kornai and other former FSMNLP organizers have put some effort on archiving of earlier proceedings. The SIGFSM has had varying policies concerning proceedings publishers. In FSMNLP 2009, T. Hanneforth advocated an Open Access policy. There seem to be interest in Open Access publishing in long term and a need to weight the alternatives by ballot.

In 2010, Thomas Hanneforth established a mailing list for the SIGFSM.