2024Q3 Reports: SIGMOL

SIGMOL is the special interest group on mathematics of language, which refers to the investigation of mathematical structures and methods that are of importance to the study of language.

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Members and Officers

As of 2024-06-28 SIGMOL has 310 registered members. President Henrik Björklund (Umeå universitet, Sweden) initiated the election for a new vice president on 2024-05-20 and Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University, USA) was announced as the new vice president on 2024-06-07. In line with SIGMOL regulations, the vice president will take over the duties of the president at the end of the latter's term.

Activities

The main activity of the SIG is the organization of the meeting "Mathematics of Language (MoL)", which is held every other year. The most recent MoL meeting was held online and was organized by Christian Retoré and Richard Moot (both University of Montpellier, France). Due to complications stemming from the pandemic, no MoL was held in 2023. Following the election of Thomas Graf as vice president, the highest priority for SIGMOL has been to to return MoL to a regular schedule. The current plan is to have the next in-person MoL in summer 2025, either fully in person or as a hybrid event. In addition, SIGMOL is currently assessing the option of a virtual MoL to be held in December 2024. If this is successful, a proposal will be made to the SIGMOL membership to have a MoL meeting every year, alternating between online and in-person/hybrid formats. The SIGMOL officers are also discussing the creation of new organizational structures such as an advisory panel in order to identify new ways SIGMOL can support its community, attract new students to the field, and strengthen existing ties and/or build new bridges to adjacent communities such as SCiL, the Society for Computation in Language.