DragoRadev at 20:07, 9 July 2009

2009-07-09T20:07:21Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:07, 9 July 2009
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	direct feedback on the location and timing of its meetings.		direct feedback on the location and timing of its meetings.
	These surveys have consistently indicated a strong demand		These surveys have consistently indicated a strong demand
	for EMNLP to be held off-phase ~~for~~ the standard Dec-Feb		for EMNLP to be held off-phase from the standard Dec-Feb
	ACL/NAACL/COLING paper submission deadlines (and summer		ACL/NAACL/COLING paper submission deadlines (and summer
	conferences), with a (northern) summer EMNLP submission		conferences), with a (northern) summer EMNLP submission

DragoRadev: New page: SIGDAT - 2009 Summer Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT is organizing its annual Confer...

2009-07-09T19:37:25Z

New page: SIGDAT - 2009 Summer Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT is organizing its annual Confer...

New page

SIGDAT - 2009 Summer Report

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

In 2009, SIGDAT is organizing its annual Conference on Empirical
Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore on August 6-7,
immediately following ACL 2009. Philipp Koehn and Rada Mihalcea
are the co program chairs and David Chiang is the publications chair.
There are 15 area chairs. The conference received 478 full paper
submissions (a record) and approximately 100 papers were ultimately
accepted for oral presentation and 58 submissions were accepted
for poster presentation. Preliminary pre-registration numbers
from several days before the early registration deadline exceeded 250
people, and thus full registration counts are likely to exceed
300 attendees. EMNLP 2009 will be held in 4 parallel sessions
and the proceedings will be nearly 1500 pages long. On all
dimensions EMNLP and SIGDAT have had a record year in 2009,
with EMNLP exceeding the size of most pre-2000 ACL conferences
and similar to recent EACL and NAACL-HLT main conferences
in size.

In 2008, SIGDAT organized a relatively independent 3-day EMNLP
conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, from October 25-27, at the
Prince Kuhio Hotel, Waikiki, held after the AMTA 2008
machine translation conference at the same venue.
Mirella Lapata and Hwee Tou Ng were program co-chairs,
Sebastian Pado was the publications chair and Priscilla Rasmussen
handled local arrangements. 400 paper submissions were received,
a strong number for an off-season meeting not associated
with an ACL event and held in the middle of the pacific.
81 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 35 papers
were presented as posters in a full catered dinner poster session.
Total attendance exceeded 230. The proceedings exceeded
1000 pages. Current budget numbers suggest that the conference
made a substantial surplus, showing the financial viability of
off-season anchor EMNLP conferences held even in remote locations.

Also in 2008-2009, SIGDAT completed its official constitution
and it was approved by the ACL Executive Committee (SIGDAT
was created before ACL SIGs were required to have constitutions).
Elections for officers are being held this summer. SIGDAT membership
currently exceeds 500 people.

SIGDAT has long had a tradition of all major decisions being
made by democratic vote of its 30-person organizing committee.
In addition, in recent years SIGDAT has conducted broad surveys
of its membership (and ACL attendees more broadly) for their
direct feedback on the location and timing of its meetings.
These surveys have consistently indicated a strong demand
for EMNLP to be held off-phase for the standard Dec-Feb
ACL/NAACL/COLING paper submission deadlines (and summer
conferences), with a (northern) summer EMNLP submission
deadline and Oct/Nov weekend meeting. EMNLP's three
consecutive years of 400-500 submissions and 230-300+
attendees suggests the viability of SIGDAT continuing to
organize off-phase stand-alone EMNLP meetings in the future.

The new SIGDAT constitution includes a specific mandate
that the decisions regarding location and timing of
EMNLP meetings (and other major EMNLP/SIG initiatives)
be based on the broad feedback and participation of its
membership, and a broad survey will be conducted shortly
regarding the SIGDAT membership's collective concrete
preferences for EMNLP 2010 and beyond.

- David Yarowsky
Secretary-Treasurer

2009Q3 Reports: SIGDAT - Revision history

DragoRadev at 20:07, 9 July 2009

DragoRadev: New page: SIGDAT - 2009 Summer Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT is organizing its annual Confer...