2013Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

Currently, SIGFSM is actively meeting at two workshops, the main conference FSMNLP, which is now held biennally, and the endorsed special-interest workshop ATANLP. It is planned to have a joint meeting with SIGMORPHON in 2014. ATANLP is a one-day workshop on applications of tree automata and was held twice in conjunction with ACL meetings (ACL 2010 and EACL 2012). The main conference FSMNLP typically attracts 30-50 participants and is organized as a stand-alone conference at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques.

We are still trying to grow SIGFSM into a more coherent and active community. We now publish proceedings of our events (FSMNLP 2011, 2012, 2013 and ATANLP 2010, 2012) in the ACL Anthology, but it remains a challenge to import the proceedings of older workshops into the ACL Anthology. As indicated, we decided to hold FSMNLP biennally from now on and we will consider running FSMNLP as an ACL conference satellite event in order to make FSMNLP more visible to outsiders, to make FSMNLP widely accessible (at lower cost), and to reduce the overhead work in workshop organization.

Membership

In 2013, the membership count of the SIGFSM is slowly growing, but still well below 100. We will recruit new members at the next FSMNLP meeting (July 15-17, 2013) at St. Andrews, Scotland (UK). From now on, we plan to actively recruit new members at all organized and endorsed events. Approx. 200 people currently receive the meeting announcements.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on January 1, 2013 and is to end in 2014:

• Andreas Maletti (President)
• Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
• Måns Hulden (Secretary)

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative at ACL 2013: Andreas Maletti
• Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
• Web Site Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
• Web Content Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth

SIGFSM Business Meeting and 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
• Tim Fernando (Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland) — since 2012
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France) — since 2010
• 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
• Marco Kuhlmann (Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Sweden) — since 2012
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
• Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
• 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 2013 will be held July 15-17, 2013 in St. Andrews, Scotland (UK). We look forward to invited talks of Alexander Clark (King's College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge). We have accepted 8 long and 9 short contributed papers for presentation. Traditionally, locals introduce their research area in tutorials and we will have 3 tutorials this time.

• FSMNLP 2012 was held July 23-25, 2012 in Donostia (San Sebastian), Spain. Kimmo Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki, Finland) gave the invited talk. We accepted 7 long papers and 12 short papers for presentation and the final proceedings were published in the ACL Anthology at [1]. As usual, we had 3 tutorials introducing the local research to the community.

• FSMNLP 2011 was organized in Blois, France, jointly with CIAA 2011 (Conference on Implementation and Applications of Automata) because the organizers and the dates of both events were close enough. 14 long and 3 short papers were accepted for presentation. In terms of participation, the CIAA/FSMNLP 2011 in Blois was a very successful event: [2] (see the picture). Many CIAA 2011 attendees participated both conferences. The final proceedings appeared in the ACL Anthology at [3].

SIGFSM Business Meetings

• The FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting will be held on July 16, 2013 in St. Andrews. Future FSMNLP venues (next one in 2015) will be discussed there.

• There were repeated expressions of shared interest towards a joint workshop with SIGFSM and SIGMORPHON. It was concluded that such plans would be best realized in an ACL hosted main conference. We currently plan to hold such a joint event in 2014.

ATANLP

• SIGFSM endorsed the EACL 2012 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata Techniques in Natural Language Processing (ATANLP 2012).
• The workshop took place on April 24, 2012 in Avignon, France [4].
• The final workshop proceedings are published at [5].
• The ATANLP 2010 proceedings are still missing in the ACL Anthology.

Elections

• The second SIGFSM elections were held in 2012. The current officers took over on January 1, 2013 and want to thank the previous officers for their dedicated service for SIGFSM.

Financial Report

SIGFSM only has a nominal amount of cash received from previous workshop organizers as surplus. Generally any surplus is used towards expenses of the invited speakers of later workshops.

Previous Reports

[6] 2009 [7] 2010 [8] 2011 [9] 2012 [10] 2013 [11] 2014