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

[Adrien Barbaresi]

Dear fellow web corpus linguists,

I would like to chime in on two major points: if we are to exist as a
community, we need visibility at conferences and in terms of accessible
resources.

Of course a symposium focused on WAC would be ideal, but it is worth
asking on this list how many of us could come and decide accordingly.
Since the number of scientific events is increasing rapidly, the
concurrence might just be too numerous or the financing too scarce for
enough people to come. For that reason, co-location with a major event
may still be a feasible solution.

If I understand correctly, the CLARIN or YaCy initiatives share a common
ground, that is resource pooling. We could confer on how to make part of
our corpora available under a "meta" multilingual search engine. A
research consortium such as CLARIN can help at the institutional level,
and distributed search engines like YaCy are a practical solution for
low-resource cooperation.
If finances are the issue at stake, consortia like CLARIN can help with
that in the form of sub-grants for community building or travel
expenses. Maybe it is what Darja could tell us more about.

All the best,
Adrien
http://adrien.barbaresi.eu

Am 01.08.2017 um 10:39 schrieb Roland Schäfer:
> Hello Miloš and everyone,
> 
> thanks for keeping the discussion alive.
> 
> As far as I can see, five people have contributed to the discussion so
> far. What about the other 179 registered list members (which, by the
> traditional definition, are the members of SIGWAC)?
> 
> On 01.08.17 10:09, Miloš Jakubíček wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
> 
> while I have nothing but the highest respect for the CLARIN initiative,
> this would be the least attractive option IMO, especially as a regular
> solution. CLARIN meetings are neither attended by most (corpus)
> linguists nor by most computational linguists. This would mean a
> complete withdrawal to the realm of resource creators/curators. The
> unique feature of WAC used to be (and should be) its flexibility and its
> mixed audience, and while CLARIN has many positive features, these two
> are likely not among them.
> 
> I just looked at the programme of the 2016 CLARIN conference here
> 
> https://www.clarin.eu/content/programme-clarin-annual-conference-2016
> 
> to confirm this assessment.
> 
> Ceterum censeo WAC primarily needs new "members" (= new people aware of
> and interested in the potential of WAC) not just a hosting event, and we
> should agree on a TOPIC that has the potential to attract them (such as
> CleanerEval focusing on conceptual problems rather than technical ones,
> at least in the first phase). Since the discussion so far has basically
> confirmed that it is very hard to find a conference to co-locate with,
> it might be a good idea to organise a stand-alone symposium without
> having to decide on a hosting event. I'm not sure about CL, but in
> linguistics, stand-alone workshops and symposiums are a common thing.
> 
> Best,
> Roland
> _______________________________________________
> Sigwac mailing list
> Sigwac at sslmit.unibo.it
> http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/sigwac
>