2013Q3 Reports: SIGMOL
SIGMOL is the ACL special interest group dedicated to mathematical linguistics, which refers to the study of mathematical structures and methods that are of importance to the study of language.
As of 2013-07-16 SIGMOL has 263 members. Its current officers are:
- president András Kornai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
- vice president Marco Kuhlmann (Uppsala University, Sweden)
The terms of the current officers end on 2013-08-09, when the next business meeting of SIGMOL will be held. At this time the vice president takes over the duties of the president, and the outgoing president takes over the duties of the vice president, until a new vice president will be elected in 2014.
The main activity of the SIG is the organization of the biennial meeting “Mathematics of Language”. The next meeting, MoL 13, will be collocated – for the first time – with ACL, and will thus take place in Sofia, Bulgaria. András Kornai and Marco Kuhlmann are the program chairs. The meeting attracted 17 submissions, 1 of which was withdrawn during the review period. Out of these, 10 submissions were selected for presentation at the meeting, giving an acceptance rate of 59%. The invited talk will be given by Mark Johnson (Macquarie University, Australia). More information can be found at the website of MoL 13: http://www.molweb.org/mol13/
In connection with the last elections, we polled the membership on several issues critical to the future of the group, including publication outlets and meeting venues – for a summary see http://kornai.com/straw.pdf. Two clusters of opinion emerged, roughly along the theoretical math/applied math dimension, and we had two candidates for next president running on platforms well-aligned with the respective cluster centers. After the matter was put to vote, the SIG elected Marco Kuhlmann with 54% of the votes. We see this as a mandate for closer integration with the ACL. The collocation of MoL 13 with ACL 2013 is a first step in this direction.
András Kornai and Marco Kuhlmann, 2013-07-16