2023Q3 Reports: SIGWAC

The Special Interest Group of the ​Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) on Web as Corpus.

Objectives

• to promote interest in the use of the web as a source of linguistic data, either for language research or language modelling
• to serve as a communication channel for exchanging news, findings, experience in using web as a source of linguistic data
• to endorse projects, resources and technologies that are considered examples of good practice or state-of-the-art
• to sponsor meetings and workshops on topics related to using the web as source of linguistic data

Officers

• Co-Chair: Nikola Ljubešić (email: nikola.ljubesic(at)ijs.si)
• Co-Chair: Benoît Sagot (email: benoit.sagot(at)inria.fr)
• Co-Secretary: ​Veronika Laippala (mavela(at)utu.fi)
• Co-Secretary: Pedro Ortiz Suarez (pedro.ortiz(at)dfki.de)

The current SIGWAC officers' term is January 2023 - December 2025.

Elections

The current officers were elected in the elections held in December 2022.

Activities

The new officers are focusing on:

• Improving the visibility of the SIG (i.e., increasing the number of its members) by endorsing prominent projects, resources, technologies
• Encouraging the discussion on most pressing topics of using the web as a source of linguistic data, inter alia technical aspects (JavaScript, continuous crawling etc.), legal aspects (IPR etc.), usability aspects (automatic enrichment), and especially, the future of web as a source of human linguistic data in light of generative AI technologies
• Endorsing events in the first part of their term, while in the second part SIG-focused workshops will quite likely be held

Website

The website of the SIG is still https://www.sigwac.org.uk. The newly elected officers are working on further updating its content.

Membership

Membership of the SIG is measured through the mailing list subscription. At this point there are 195 mailing list subscriptions.