2019Q3 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. In 2017 we met in Umeå, Sweden (September 4-6) organized by Frank Drewes and later this 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. The TAG+ workshop in 2017 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 2019, 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 this 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 ended at the end of 2018:

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 [10] was held September 4-6, 2017 in Umeå, Sweden. Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK) and Gregory Kobele (University of Leipzig, Germany) gave the keynote lectures. Ann reported on "Dependency Semantics and Composition" and Greg spoke about "Higher Order Structures in Minimalist Derivations". As usual, there were tutorials that introduced particular research areas. More precisely, Laura Kallmeyer (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) introduced "Syntax-Driven Semantic Frame Composition in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars", Johanna Björklund (University of Umeå, Sweden) spoke about "Minimization Techniques for Automata and Grammars", and Sylvain Pogodalla (INRIA Nancy, France) presented "Abstract Categorial Grammars as a Model of the Syntax-Semantics Interface for TAG". All invited talks and tutorials were joint lectures for FSMNLP 2017 as well as TAG+ 2017.

SIGFSM Business Meetings

The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on September 5, 2017 at FSMNLP im Umeå, Sweden.
The next business meeting will be held on September 24 (exact date to be confirmed), 2019 at FSMNLP im Dresden, Germany.

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 were scheduled for 2018 (but did not take place).

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.

Previous Reports

[1] 2009 [2] 2010 [3] 2011 [4] 2012 [5] 2013 [6] 2014 [7] 2015 [8] 2016 [9] 2017 [10] 2018