SIGDAT
Ken Church, David Yarowsky


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

In 2001, SIGDAT organized the 2-day Conference on Empirical Methods 
in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2001). The meeting was held
immediately prior to NAACL-2001 at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 3 and 4.

Lillian Lee served as conference chair and Donna Harman served as 
conference co-chair. 21 papers were accepted for presentation out of 
65 submissions, consistent with the typical 25-32% acceptance rate 
of SIGDAT conferences and workshops. 

Approximately 200 people attended EMNLP-2001, and the conference
yielded a $6000 surplus based on preliminary post-conference 
accounting.

The theme of the conference was "What Works and What Doesn't: 
Successes and Challenges".  Eric Brill of Microsoft Research 
gave an invited talk on the subject "Paucity Shmaucity -- What Can 
We Do With A Trillion Words?". Two panels were held, 
one on the topic of "When Does EM Work?" (with Eugene Charniak, 
Kevin Knight, Ted Pedersen, and Stefan Riezler) and
one on "What Works and What Doesn't: Industrial Perspectives" 
(with Adam Berger, David Evans, Joshua Goodman, and Lynette Hirschman). 

Generous sponsorship was provided by the Intelligent Information Systems 
Institute (a joint Cornell University/Air Force Research Laboratory 
organization).