2011Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Membership

In 2010, the membership count of the SIGFSM was 57 members. This is not up to date, but not far from the reality now. The FSMNLP 2011 event is likely to bring more members.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on 11 May, 2010 and is to end in 2012:

• Anssi Yli-Jyrä (President)
• Thomas Hanneforth (Treasurer)
• Laurette Pretorius (Secretary)

Other Positions:

• Liaison Representative in ACL 2011: Andreas Maletti
• Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
• Web Site Resource Manager: N/A
• Web Content Resource Manager: N/A

SIGFSM Business Meeting and International Advisory Committee

The members of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) were nominated in 2010 by the president and they are to continue at this position for (at least) the year 2011 by default.

• Matthieu Constant (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France)
• Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France)
• Lauri Karttunen (Stanford University, USA)
• Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute, USA)
• András Kornai (Harvard University, USA & Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary)
• Andreas Maletti (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
• Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
• Bruce W. Watson (University of Pretoria, SA & Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
• Menno van Zaanen (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
• Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University, SA)
• the elected officers

Events and Publications

In 2010, the FSMNLP 2009 workshop published its postproceedings i.e. the revised and selected papers in the series of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS) by Springer (publication year 2010).

In 2010, SIGFSM held the first elections.

A special issue in the journal of Natural Language Processing received submissions in June 2010 and the special issue was sent to the publisher in November 2010. The issue came out as the number 2 issue in 2011.

The workshop: In the summer 2010, plans for a joint event of the FSMNLP workshop and the Conference on Implementations and Applications of Automata was prepared. The current web location for the joint event is http://ciaa-fsmnlp-2011.univ-tours.fr/ciaa/. The event FSMNLP 2011 is taking place in Blois, France on 12-16 (12-15) July, 2011.

The FSMNLP continues it collaborative tradition which allows relating to the related events: CIAA/FSMNLP 2010 will be organized shortly before two other conferences on related subjects: DLT 2011 (July 19-22, Milan, Italy) and DCFS 2011 (July 25-27, Giessen, Germany).

The prior plans for proceedings archive and future publication policies have been followed:

• A lot of efforts for establishing open access publication channels for FSMNLP were done. Various issues were contacted (the team work involved the workshop chairs, PC chair and the president and possibly others)
• The papers and abstracts will be published in FSMNLP 2011 proceedings and archived in the ACL Anthology.
• The FSMNLP organizers managed to secure a special issue of the Journal of Logic and Computation (Oxford Univ. Press, http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/ ) for papers presented at FSMNLP 2011 and IWPT 2011 ( http://www.dcu.ie/conferences/iwpt/ ).

Two tutorials will be organized in the FSMNLP workshop:

• Eric Laporte, LIGM, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France: "Tutorial on Unitex" (http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~unitex/)
• Sylvain Lombardy, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France: "Tutorial on Vaucanson" (http://www.lrde.epita.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Vaucanson/WebHome)
• In addition, there have been EU funded tutorials on the FSM methods in NLP, but these are not strictly SIGFSM activities.

A mailing list for the SIGFSM has been established in 2010 and is under development in 2011.