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The Special Interest Group of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) on Web as Corpus.
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The Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus aims to research the opportunities and limitations of using textual web data for
- performing linguistic research
- modelling knowledge of language
- modelling extralinguistic knowledge
Objectives
- To build a community around the web-as-corpus research
- To support and promote information exchange and the dissemination of results and best practices
- To organize workshops, hackathons and shared tasks
Download the constitution of ACL SIGWAC.
Topics of interest
Given ever growing data needs of Large Language Models (LLMs), Web Corpora have now taken a central place in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL) and Machine Learning (ML). As such, SIGWAC has decided to separate our topics of interest in three different aspects:
Technical Aspects
- Filtering strategies for web data in LLM pre-training.
- Impact of web data in the pre-training data mix of LLMs.
- Crawling and ranking.
- Construction of web graphs.
- Language identification, multilinguality, and Web as a Corpus for low resource languages.
- Web indexing, information retrieval and LLM application in document representations.
- Semantic web and automatic annotation of multilingual web data.
Legal Aspects
- Intellectual Property and licensing of Web data.
- Robot exclusion protocol and other opt-out methods for AI training.
- Privacy preservation in web corpora, automatic PII detection and redaction.
- Study and application of the TDM directive in the EU.
- Study and application of the AI act in the EU.
- Scope of data usage.
Societal aspects
- Socio-linguistic studies of web data.
- Web-graph as a tool for web corpora exploration in a multidisciplinary setting.
- Study of bias and toxicity in web corpora.
- Study of illegal content prevalence in web corpora.
- Web corpora as a means to promote multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Beyond these topics of interest we also aim to:
- Promote interest in the use of the web as a source of linguistic data, and as an object of study in its own right;
- Provide members of the ACL with a special interest in the web-as-corpus with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest (e.g. the upcoming crisis on web data authenticity given the recent staggering improvements in generative large language models);
- Sponsor meetings and workshops on the web as corpus that appear to be timely and worthwhile.
Officers
- Nikola Ljubešić (co-president)
- Benoît Sagot (co-president)
- Veronika Laippala (co-secretary)
- Pedro Ortiz Suarez (co-secretary)
Resources
Corpora
- CommonCrawl
- HPLT
- OSCAR
- ParaCrawl
- MaCoCu
- CLASSLA South Slavic web corpora
- Aranea web corpora
- CLARIN.SI web corpora
- University of Leeds (CTS) web corpora
- Web corpora on Sketchengine (commercial product)
- WaCKy corpora
Technologies
- A Masaryk University and Lexical Computing list of tools for harvesting and processing web data
- The XGENRE multilingual text genre classifier
- Massively Multilingual Modeling of Web Registers by TurkuNLP
Additional information
- Schäfer and Bildhauer's web corpus book
- Stephanie Evert's WAC website
- CLEANEVAL, a competition for cleaning webpages
Meetings
- WAC-XII at LREC 2020, Marseille, France, 16 May 2020… CANCELLED due to Covid-19 outbreak but proceedings have been published!
- WAC-XI at Corpus Linguistics 2017, Birmingham, UK, 24-27 July 2017
- WAC-X at ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany, 12 August 2016
- WAC@eLex2015, In 2015 we will meet at eLex, Herstmonceux Castle, UK, 10 August 2015
- WAC9, at EACL 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 April 2014
- WAC8, at Corpus Linguistics 2013, Lancaster, UK, 22 July 2013
- WAC7, at WWW12, Lyon, France, 17 April 2012
- BUCC, Building and Using Comparable Corpora, Portland, Oregon, 24 June 2011, In 2011 we will meet at the BUCC workshop at ACL2011
- WAC6, at NAACL-HLT, Los Angeles, USA, 5 June 2010: programme here
- WAC5, at SPLN, San Sebastian, Basque Country, Spain, 7 September 2009
- WAC4 at LREC, Marrakech, Morocco, 1 June 2008
- WAC3, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 15-16 September 2007
- WAC2, at EACL, Trento, Italy, April 2006
- WAC1, at Corpus Linguistics conference, Birmingham, UK, July 2005
ACL SIGWAC annual reports
- ACL SIGWAC 2024 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2023 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2021 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2020 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2019 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2018 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2016 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2015 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2014 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2013 Q3 report
- ACL SIGWAC 2012 Q3 report
- Older reports...
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constitution.txt
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Constitution of the SIGWAC
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