[Sigwac] Call for discussion: The SIGWAC crisis (instead, of an announcement of WAC-XI)

Miloš Jakubíček milos.jakubicek at sketchengine.co.uk
Tue Aug 1 10:09:59 CEST 2017


Hi Serge,

On 1 August 2017 at 00:53, Serge Sharoff <S.Sharoff at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> The opposite direction of influence is also important.  Chris mentions
> that a
> very small minority of the CL people is likely to know about the BNC.
> That's
> probably true. I agree that the ACL-related community overall pays little
> attention to their data. However, this doesn't mean they shouldn't.
>

That prompts me to quote one of the Adam's posts to this list:

"
I often think, if NLP people put as much effort into the training data as
the algorithms, our systems would perform much better. There's so much more
I could say on the subject (on the problem of language-specific work in
Computer Science, on what's open and what's proprietary, on generalising
across text types, on statistical vs rule-based systems and in-built biases
in favour of statistical ones, when we compare performance figures) -- but
the post would quickly get much too long!
"

So - without this posts getting too long, I certainly agree that from
linguistic perspective part of the WAC's mission is to make NLP people
aware of this.


> Still this leaves the question of co-location of the next WAC events open.
> I
> don't have an answer here. Yes, I don't think many people like overpriced
> ACL/LREC events. However, many (in the CL community) commit themselves to
> going
> there. As mentioned, the previous events co-located with those conferences
> never
> failed because of the lack of submissions.
>

We had a brief chat in Birmingham last week. I proposed checking whether
(and under what conditions) WAC could collocate with the annual CLARIN
conferences.
Darja Fišer (now CLARIN's user involvement officer) will discuss this topic
at CLARIN's board meeting in September -- so we might want to revisit then.

Best
Milos


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