SIGLEX (Adam Kilgarriff, Martha Palmer)
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		      SIGLEX Report to ACL Executive
			     22 Sept 2000

There has been the following activity since the last ACL.
 
1) 'Standardizing Lexical Resources' workshop at Maryland ACL '99.

This well-attended workshop carried forward the debate on how lexical
resources might be standardized, respective roles of EU projects
(particularly EAGLES) and US initiatives, and how agreement on
suitable sense inventories --as required for NLP in general, and
SENSEVAL in particular-- might be achieved.  Chair: Martha Palmer;
Invited speakers: Nicoletta Calzolari, Chuck Fillmore, Patrick
Hanks and Piek Vossen; Panel organisers: Christiane Fellbaum and Philip Resnik.

2) NLE Special Issue on Semantic Tagging

The special issue of the Natural Language Engineering Journal based on the
SIGLEX97 workshop held in conjunction with ANLP'97 in Washington DC was
published as NLE 5(2) 1999.  It was edited by Martha Palmer and Marc Light,
and was published by Cambridge University Press.

3) CHum Special Issue on SENSEVAL

The SIGLEX-sponsored SENSEVAL (Word Sense Disambiguation Evaluation)
exercise in 1998 generated a high level of interest, and the journal
Computers and the Humanities proposed a Special Issue.  In the event,
it was a Special Double Issue (34 1--2), edited by Adam Kilgarriff and
Martha Palmer.  It was published in June 2000 by Kluwer.

4) SENSEVAL-2 

In the course of the year SENSEVAL-2 has been planned for 2001.  Again
it will be primarily a SIGLEX event, though also under the aegis of
EURALEX (European Assn for Lexicography). A call for interest was
posted in spring, and it currently looks hopeful that there will be
tasks for

  * French
  * English
  * Italian
  * Japanese
  * Spanish
  * Danish
  * German
  * Estonian
  * Swedish
  * Korean
  * Chinese

(Last time there were tasks for just 3 languages.)  There are likely
to be over 30 participating systems, with most teams participating for
English. 

Co-ordinators are Adam Kilgarriff and Phil Edmonds (of Sharp Labs Europe).

In consultation with Patrick St-Dizier, we have recently set the
SENSEVAL-2 workshop for July 6-7 in Toulouse, running as a regular
ACL-2001 workshop.  We are aware this is somewhat forward of us, as we
did not go through the workshops chair.  We hope we are forgiven, as
it proved hard to set a date, and SENSEVAL involves large quantities
of planning and data preparation so it was necessary to clarify the
schedule a full year ahead.

5) 'Word Senses and Multilinguality' workshop, ACL 2000, Hong Kong

This workshop, organised by Nancy Ide, Phil Resnik, Chuck Fillmore and
David Yarowsky, addresses particularly a challenging question that has
arisen in several recent SIGLEX events: can sense inventories be
idenfified by operationalising the intuition that a word only has
interestingly distinct senses where the distinct senses have different
translations in other languages.  Several good papers have been
received and we look forward to a tightly-focussed workshop.

6) Adoption of a constitution

SIGLEX has until now been without a formal constitution.  One has now
been proposed and will be voted on at the ACL workshop in Hong Kong.
The constitution is closely modelled on those of other ACL SIGs.

Proposals for officers include:

Nominating committee:
Nicoletta Calzolari (University of Pisa), 
Marc Light (MITRE Corporation),
Martha Palmer (University of Pennsylvania), and 
Philip Resnik (University of Maryland)  

President: Adam Kilgarriff, ITRI, University of Brighton 
Secretary: Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University 

Information Officers: 
Grame Hirst, University of Toronto
Martha Evens, Northwestern University
Boyan Onyshkevych, Department of Defense
Charles Fillmore, University of California, Berkeley

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Adam Kilgarriff
Martha Palmer

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