2017Q3 Reports: SIGSLAV
Summary
The purpose of SIGSLAV (the ACL Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing) established in December 2014 is to stimulate research in NLP and creation of linguistic resources for the Slavic languages. The SIGSLAV web page located at: http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi maintained by Lidia Pivovarova and Roman Yangarber remains an important source of up-to-date information on relevant events and activities.
As of 2017 SIGSLAV is meeting at its main workshop BSNLP (Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing) , which is held biennally (last in 2017; next in 2019). Our meetings 1 typically attract 30-40 participants and are organized as co-located workshops of major conferences in the area of NLP and computational linguistics. The last one (6th edition) was held in Valencia (Spain) on 4 April 2017.
We are continuously elaborating strategies to grow SIGSLAV into a more active community. To facilitate this task an Advisory Board has been established in 2015. It is also important to emphasize that support from ACL is of paramount importance for SIGSLAV in the context of acknowledging that BSNLP is currently the flagship workshop of the SIG.
Membership
Since the establishment of SIGSLAV in 2014, the membership count of the SIG grew to 110 as of July 2017. In particular, BSNLP 2017 workshop held on 4 April 2017 in Valencia in Spain facilitated recruitment of new members. We intend to use SIGSLAV-sponsored events to actively recruit new members.
Officers
The term of the elected officers started on 1 December 2014:
- Chair: Jakub Piskorski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw & Joint Research
Centre of the European Commission
- Vice-Chair: Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Secretary: Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Croatia
- Resource Manager: Lidia Pivovarova, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Resource Manager: Hristo Tanev, Joint Research Centre, European Commission