PaolaMerlo: 2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT moved to 2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT (SUBMITTED)

2010-06-21T15:16:57Z

2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT moved to 2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT (SUBMITTED)

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PaolaMerlo: New page: SIGDAT - February 2010 Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT organized its annual Conferen...

2010-06-21T15:15:06Z

New page: SIGDAT - February 2010 Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT organized its annual Conferen...

New page

SIGDAT - February 2010 Report

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

In 2009, SIGDAT organized 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
were the co-program chairs, Haizhou Li was local arrangements
chair and David Chiang was the publications chair.
There were 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. Attendance exceeded 300 people.
EMNLP 2009 was held in 4 parallel sessions and the proceedings
were nearly 1500 pages long. On all dimensions EMNLP and SIGDAT
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.

The SIGDAT committee has voted to hold EMNLP 2010 in the
northeast US during late October 2010. Based on the
longstanding democratic traditions of SIGDAT governance,
a survey of the entire SIGDAT membership was conducted
to identify the preferred location, duration and dates
of the meeting, as well as to achieve an initial indication
of likely paper submission and attendance. Over 260 SIGDAT
members responded, including 53% from North America and
roughly 25% from Europe and Asia respectively. There was
a strong collective preference for holding the meeting
in the Boston/Cambridge area over a Fri/Sat/Sun weekend
with 2-3 parallel sessions (over several other location
and scheduling options). There was less consensus regarding
the preferred weekend but sufficient rank ordering to help
guide our search for a venue with availability. Interestingly
98% of respondents (over 255) said that they planned to
submit papers to EMNLP 2010, 99% of those planned to attend
if they had a paper/poster accepted and over 80% said that
it was likely they would attend even if they *didn't* have a
paper or poster accepted. These numbers indicate that attendance
of at least 225 is likely, helping SIGDAT with its venue choice
and budget planning. Based on the traditionally accelerated
SIGDAT reviewing schedule a late June or early July submission
deadline is anticipated, facilitating submission of late-breaking
work and minimizing conflict with other 2010 conferences.
The SIGDAT organizers will seek ways to facilitate attendance
of participants requiring US visas under this schedule.

The SIGDAT committee has also voted to hold EMNLP 2011 as
an anchor event in late summer 2011 in Europe, to help
compensate for a general lack of NLP/CL conferences in
2011 (with no COLING or EACL and one potentially huge
ACL meeting in Portland in early summer). A three-day EMNLP
conference plus 1 day of associated workshops is the
committee recommendation, with potential direct collaboration
with other larger ACL SIGs under discussion. We also request
to participate in the standard coordinated joint proposal
submission process for smaller workshops with the main ACL
conference, given that ACL 2011 by itself will most likely
not have capacity to support all of the workshops normally
held over 3-4 CL/NLP conferences in a more typical year.
SIGDAT believes that this special EMNLP anchor event will
help provide load balancing benefiting the broader ACL
community in a year with many fewer than normal potential
paper presentation slots. A general chair appointment is
currently under review to take on this significant organizational
role.

Under normal continental rotation, EMNLP 2012 would normally
be held in Asia, and collocation with ACL 2012 in Asia would
seem to have benefits. CoNLL has expressed some interest in
a potential joint meeting in 2012. Given the less immediate
time sensitivity of this decision, it may be deferred until
after new SIGDAT elections are held (infrastructure for
doing so is nearly in place) or made via direct vote of
SIGDAT's membership, as part of a series of forward looking
questions for the SIG.

Overall, SIGDAT has had a continuing history of organizational
success, with three consecutive years of 400-500 submissions
and 230-300+ attendees, suggesting the viability of SIGDAT
continuing to organize off-phase stand-alone EMNLP meetings
in the future, especially when held in North America or Europe,
as well as its ability to help add critical mass to other conferences
when held in collocation.

2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT (SUBMITTED) - Revision history

PaolaMerlo: 2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT moved to 2010Q3 Reports: SIGDAT (SUBMITTED)

PaolaMerlo: New page: SIGDAT - February 2010 Report SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. In 2009, SIGDAT organized its annual Conferen...