2025Q3 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.
_
Members and Officers
As of 2054-06-25 SIGMOL has 317 registered members. In line witih SIGMOL regulations, current vice president Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University, USA) will take over the role of president from the acting president Henrik Björklund (Umeå universitet, Sweden) after the annual meeting (see activities). Elections will be held in July 2025 for a new vice president, who will become president after MOL 2027.
Activities
The main activity of the SIG is the organization of the meeting "Mathematics of Language (MoL)", which is held every other year. The next MoL meeting will take place in a hybrid format at Stony Brook University, NY from 2025-08-16 to 2025-08-17. The program chairs are Jeffrey Heinz (Stony Brook University), Larry Moss (University of Indiana Bloomington), Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University), and Yang Wang (University of Utah). The local organizers are Gary Mar, Jeffrey Heinz, and Thomas Gaf (all Stony Brook University). A total of 12 submissions were accepted and will appear in the ACL proceedings series.
Several potential initiatives will be discussed at the business meeting of this year's meeting:
- A lot of the current SIGMOL infrastructure, in particular its website, domain name, and mailing list, are tied to the university services of specific SIGMOL members. This makes them difficult to maintain by the SIGMOL leadership, and as these members near retirement there is an increasing risk of losing access to essential pieces of the SIGMOL infrastructure.
- There is a proposal proposal that MoL should change its current schedule of being held every other year. Instead, MoL should be held annually, taking place in-person in odd years and online in even years.
- Finally, there will be an open discussion about potential initiatives and structural changes so that SIGMOL can more efficiently 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.