SIGDAT (Ken Church, David Yarowsky)
===================================

                SIGDAT - 2000 Annual Report 

SIGDAT is ACL's special interest group for linguistic data and
corpus-based approaches to NLP.

In 2000, SIGDAT organized the 2-day Joint SIGDAT Conference
on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very
Large Corpora (EMNLP/VLC-2000). The meeting was held immediately
following ACL-2000 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
on October 7 and 8. 

Hinrich Schuetze served as conference chair and Keh-Yih Su served as 
conference co-chair. 26 papers were accepted for presentation out of 
approximately 80 submissions, consistent with the typical 
25-32% acceptance rate of SIGDAT conferences and workshops.

EMNLP/VLC-2000 invited speakers were John B. Lowe (VP of Language Engineering, 
Ask Jeeves Inc.), speaking on the topic of "What's in store for question 
answering? Prognostications based on corpus analysis of several 
hundred million questions" and Soumen Chakrabarti of the Indian 
Institute of Technology. A panel session was held on the topic
of "NLP for the Web: Critical Technology or Luxury?"

Generous EMNLP/VLC-2000 corporate sponsorship was provided by 
Ask Jeeves Inc, Behavior Design Corporation, GroupFire Inc,
Intel China Research Center and LEXIS NEXIS.

EMNLP/VLC-99 is a temporary merger of SIGDAT's two thriving
meeting series, the Conference on Empirical Methods in NLP 
and the Workshop on Very Large Corpora, now in their 8th and
5th year respectively.

	- David Yarowsky
          Secretary-Treasurer