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

[Miloš Jakubíček]

Dear Roland et al,

thank you for raising the issue and making such a detailed analysis of the
status, which I think I agree with in most if not all of the points, though
I am not sure about the future options.
Let me add two things:

1)
There is one consideration to be taken into account that I would like to
emphasize and that makes WAC different from most of the other ACL SIGs.
Namely, that we are a community with users and our users are not our
contributors.
I think this became clear at eLex in 2015, where WAC had not enough
submissions but extremely many (maybe even the most? It was over 50)
registered and paying participants.
So, people wanted to come and learn news from WAC -- but there was nobody
to present (kudos here to Egon Stemle for a very decent failover solution
at the time).

2)
Further on -- and again in line with your analysis -- web corpora are now
widespread. As result, and I thing that this may be quite relevant, less
people are interested in WAC also because the low hanging fruit has gone,
and what remained are sometimes quite tough issues.

Now, because of point 1) I'm not sure whether a stronger linguistic drive
would help resurrecting WAC.
I think we might not need to think about steering one way or another (in
fact, collocating with ACL events always brought enough attention, and for
me the ACL stands for both of the worlds here, the linguistic one and the
computer science/engineering one),
but I find it crucial to try to setup a new agenda and see whether people
are interested to work on it - if yes, that's the key to success, I
believe. (Your idea about the joint paper seems to be like an excellent
starting point here.)

I also think WAC needs to maintain its "workshopability" -- it was never
and will never be an event where you will publish results that you can
publish in conferences or journals (where they get indexed etc.).
This does not mean anything like lowering one's standards, but rather
maintaining the status of a (top) forum for raising important issues,
though there are no satisfactory solutions to them yet.

If we could manage to draft this agenda in Birmingham, that would be
wonderful, and I invite everybody to try to do some homework on that so
that we do not start from scratch but with comparing notes.
Maybe we can even make a public shared Google doc and see where it ends, if
you like.

Finally, I think there is a growing need to put more effort into WAC
activities even just to remain at where we are now. The web is constantly
changing, and at least our (=Sketch Engine's) experience is that it becomes
harder to crawl than before.
Concurrently, the web grows, so the same methods used five years ago yield
more data anyway (on the same languages), so some of the technological
innovation (e.g. web pages that, for crawling, basically require rendering
the content in the browser) may go unnoticed despite introducing unwanted
biases.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing all of you next week in Birmingham,


Milos Jakubicek

CEO, Lexical Computing
Brno, CZ | Brighton UK
http://www.lexicalcomputing.com
http://www.sketchengine.co.uk

On 7 July 2017 at 14:38, Vladimír Benko <vladob at juls.savba.sk> wrote:

> Dear Roland,
>
> I fully agree both with your and Serge (i.e., several topics to discuss,
> need to decide what next, and little time to write posts ;-).
>
> Looking forward to meeting you in Birmingham,
>
> Vlado B, 14:35
>
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