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

[Miloš Jakubíček]

Hi Chris,

On 25 July 2017 at 19:38, chris brew <cbrew at acm.org> wrote:

>
> I'm not sure about continuing to co-locate with ACL. The proportion of
> regular attendees at ACL who have deep background in any form of
> linguistics continues to decline


Agree (and, it is not a good trend in my view, and do note I'm not a
linguist:)


> , and the proportion with an understanding
> of corpus linguistics has never been high


;)


> . I suspect that
> the number of young attendees who have even heard of the BNC is very low
> indeed.


I hope that is still not true, but...


> So the number of ACL people who would be drawn to WAC is probably
> fairly small.


Hm, we had some fair amount of people last year (20?)


> Added to which, the conference has fee schedules that are not
> really compatible with attendance by researchers who do not have the luxury
> (or, to an extent, burden) of large-money engineering-style grants.
>

This is, indeed, a big issue, and I wonder what the rest of ACL community
thinks about that.
Especially last year, where for some 600-700 euros there were not even big
enough rooms for people,
I found the fees entirely inappropriate (also considering substantial
sponsoring from companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft present there).


> The overlap between SIGWAC and the ACL community was stronger when there
> were many carefully curated annotated corpora being built by NLP teams.
> This is not happening so much now. To the extent that I understand what the
> people who did this are now doing, it seems to me that crowdsourcing has
> risen, which usually implies shallower annotation. At the same time, some
> of those people are doing more with transformations and re-use of existing
> annotated corpora, as well as pushing towards methods that learn everything
> from raw text. This doesn't mesh well with SIGWAC's mission. The synergy is
> less than it was.
>
> So I think the primary task is to identify a large enough community and
> co-locate with conferences that are compatible with that community.
>

Agree -- we might well be very opportunistic here from year to year,
but all your objections against regular collocating with ACL are very valid.

For anybody present at Corpus Linguistics in Birmingham, yesterday there
were some thoughts that we could all meet at today's barbecue, so let's
hope for that.

Best
Milos