2008Q3 Reports: Wiki

ACL Wiki for Computational Linguistics - Report for 2008

Peter Turney peter.turney@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

The ACL Wiki (http://aclweb.org/aclwiki) is now one-and-a-half years old. Since the ACL Report for 2007, the ACL Wiki has continued to grow in content and popularity. The total number of page views has grown from 100,000 to 350,000. The number of pages has increased from 1,700 to 2,000. This figure includes pages that have relatively low content; the number of high-content pages has grown from 100 to 235. On an average day, there are more than 600 page views. (More statistics are available on the Wiki itself.)

The purpose of the ACL Wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. The Wiki includes links to blogs, conferences, competitions, people, organizations, course descriptions, corpora, datasets, and introductory articles on a variety of CL and NLP topics. One area of strong growth has been the lists of resources for languages other than English.

The ACL Wiki is a gathering spot for bringing together the Computational Linguistics community. For example, the Textual Entailment Portal is a subset of the ACL Wiki that "serves as a community portal for everything related to Textual Entailment", bringing together the RTE community. As another example, the ACL Conference Handbook is now hosted on the ACL Wiki, which makes it easier to keep the Handbook up-to-date, and makes it more accessible to the community.

All members of ACL are strongly encouraged to contribute to the ACL Wiki. Whatever subfield of Computational Linguistics you work in, this is your opportunity to raise the profile of research in your area. You can write an introductory article for your subfield, create a bibliography with links to online papers, make a list of key resources for your subfield, or add benchmarks for your subfield to the State of the Art pages in the ACL Wiki. In the Research section of the ACL Wiki, there are several fledgling articles that need some expert help, on topics such as Lexical Acquisition, Machine Translation, Information Extraction, and Multiword Expressions. Consider that the number of readers of your contribution to the ACL Wiki might well surpass the number of readers of a typical conference paper. The time you invest in the ACL Wiki will have high returns for the community.