2014Q3 Reports: SIGHUM

The ACL Special Interest Group on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SIGHUM) is intended to provide a forum for CL researchers who are developing language technology for data from the socio-economic sciences or the humanities (SSH). It also functions as a contact point for SSH stakeholders. ACL SIGHUM stands officially since June 2012.

Organisation & Elections

The first SIGHUM elections took place in October 2013. The voting was anonymous and the process was organised by Caroline Sporleder and Andrei Beliankou, University of Trier, Germany. The following elected board officers are serving until October 2015:

• President: Antal van den Bosch, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

• Secretary: Kalliopi Zervanou, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

• Liaison officer: Marieke van Erp, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The next election process will begin in September 2015.

Membership

SIGHUM is open to all interested parties and does not charge any membership fees. Members should be however active in CL and SSH research and applications, as indicated by their affiliation and publications. Membership involves registration and participation in the mailing list & the elections. The membership roster is maintained by the Secretary and is updated online at SIGHUM Members List. Membership currently stands at 110.

An overview of membership counts for the two years of the SIGHUM standing is given below:

• 2013: 75

• 2014: 110

Activities overview

LaTeCH workshop series: LaTeCH is the main annual event endorsed by SIGHUM and the venue for the SIGHUM annual research and business meeting. It aims to provide a forum for researchers who are working on language technology research for the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage domains.

• LaTeCH 2013 was collocated with ACL 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

It was co-chaired by Piroska Lendvai (Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics) and Kalliopi Zervanou (Radboud University Nijmegen), with co-organisers Caroline Sporleder (Trier University) and Antal van den Bosch (Radboud University Nijmegen). The workshop was attended by approx. 25 participants. The program included 15 papers and the acceptance rate was 62%. The SIGHUM business meeting focused on strategies for SIGHUM liaison with the various national CLARIN committees, the Europeana and the Digital Humanities communities.

• LaTeCH 2014 was collocated with EACL 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

It was co-chaired by Kalliopi Zervanou and Cristina Vertan (University of Hamburg), with co-organisers Caroline Sporleder and Antal van den Bosch. The workshop was attended by approx. 30 participants. The program included 17 papers and the acceptance rate was 68%. Apart for the recurring themes of linguistic variability in historical text, OCR error correction and annotation tools and resource development, LaTeCH 2014 had contributions about applications in social sciences and resource development for non-European languages and cultural heritage, such as the Tagalog language and the Wayang Indonesian shadow puppet mythology. For LaTeCH 2014 we have focused on Linked Data as a special theme and we had Gerhard Heyer as invited speaker for this topic. CLARIN-D sponsored a part of the traveling costs for our invited speaker.

SIGHUM online presence: The SIGHUM website and a mailing list were setup and activated in September 2013.