SIGDAT (Ken Church, David Yarowsky)
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                SIGDAT - 2004 Summer Report

SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and
corpus-based approaches to NLP.

In 2004, SIGDAT will organize a 2-day Conference on Empirical Methods
in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2004). The meeting is scheduled
immediately after ACL-04 in Barcelona on July 25-26.
Dekang Lin is program chair and Dekai Wu is co-chair.

The conference appears to be highly successful: A record 257 submissions were
received, and 58 papers accepted (a 22% acceptance rate). The proceedings
exceeds 450 pages (much larger than pre-1997 full ACL's), and essentially
the entire conference will be held in parallel sessions, except for
a poster session, plenary lecture and panel session. In terms of scale
on several dimensions, EMNLP is now at a similar size to several recent
NAACL or EACL meetings.

In 2003, SIGDAT organized the 2-day Conference on Empirical Methods
in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2003). The meeting was scheduled
immediately after ACL-03 in Sapporo on July 11-12 at the Sapporo
Convention Center.

Michael Collins served as conference chair and Mark Steedman served
as co-chair. 28 papers were accepted for presentation out of 121
submissions (a 23% acceptance rate), equivalent to the main ACL sessions.
280 copies of the proceedings were printed.

- David Yarowsky
          Secretary-Treasurer