2016Q3 Reports: SIGFSM

Summary

SIGFSM [1] is actively meeting at its main conference FSMNLP, which is held biennally (last in 2015; next in 2017). Our meetings typically attract 30-50 participants and are organized as satellite workshops of major meetings or stand-alone conferences. Our premier conference FSMNLP is usually stand-alone and held at locations where the local research community is involved in developing or using finite-state techniques. In 2015 we met in Düsseldorf, Germany [2]. The next FSMNLP [3] will be held in Umeå, Sweden in summer 2017 organized by Frank Drewes. This year our SIG will organize the ACL workshop on statistical NLP and weighted automata [4].

We continue trying to grow SIGFSM into a more active community. All recent event proceedings (FSMNLP 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015 and ATANLP 2010, 2012 and MORPHFSM 2014) have been published in the ACL Anthology. We are trying to import older proceedings as well, but that remains a challenge (legal and otherwise) and we solely depend on the program committee chairs of those conference to supply the required information. Despite the current stand-alone nature of FSMNLP, we might consider running it as an ACL satellite event to make it more visible, to make it widely accessible at a lower cost, and to reduce the overhead work in organization.

Membership

In 2016, the membership count of SIGFSM is slowly growing, and is now slightly above 100. We successfully managed to recruit a few new members at FSMNLP 2015 (June 22-24, 2015 in Düsseldorf, Germany) [5], and we expect to attract some new members at the ACL workshop this year. We use our meetings to actively recruit new members, and at present, approx. 200 people receive the meeting announcements.

Officers

The term of the elected officers started on January 1, 2013. They were reelected in 2016, so their term is to end only in 2018:

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

Other Positions:

Liaison Representative at ACL 2016: Andreas Maletti
Email List Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
Web Site Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth
Web Content Resource Manager: Thomas Hanneforth

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
Laura Kallmeyer (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) — since 2015
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
Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK) — since 2015
Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) — since 2010
Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa, South Africa) — since 2010
Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany) — since 2015
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 2015 [6] was held June 22-24, 2015 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Sylvain Salvati (INRIA Bordeaux Sud-Ouest) and Andreas Maletti (University of Stuttgart) gave the keynote lectures. We accepted 12 contributions for presentation and for inclusion in the proceedings, which have been published in the ACL Anthology at [7]. Traditionally, tutorials introduce particular research areas, and we had 2 excellent tutorials presented by Mans Hulden and Ruben van de Vijver.

SIGFSM Business Meetings

The last FSMNLP/SIGFSM business meeting was held on June 22, 2015 in Düsseldorf. Plans were made for future workshops (ACL workshop in 2016; FSMNLP 2017), additional advisory committee members (Laura Kallmeyer, Mark-Jan Nederhof, and Heiko Vogler), and other minor issues. All actions have been implemented. Unfortunately, Marco Kuhlmann requested to leave the board effective in 2015.

The next business meeting will be held at FSMNLP 2017 im Umeå, Sweden.

Elections

The third SIGFSM elections were concluded in 2016. The current officers, who took over on January 1, 2013, were relected and will thus remain in office until the end of 2018. The next elections are scheduled for 2018 (typically starting in autumn).

Financial Report

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

Previous Reports

[8] 2009 [9] 2010 [10] 2011 [11] 2012 [12] 2013 [13] 2014 [14] 2015 [15] 2016