ACL SIGWAC home page

The Special Interest Group of the ​Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) on Web as Corpus.

Objectives

• 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;
• to 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;
• to sponsor meetings and workshops on the web as corpus that appear to be timely and worthwhile.

Meetings

• ​WAC1, at Corpus Linguistics conference, Birmingham, UK, July 2005
• ​WAC2, at EACL, Trento, Italy, April 2006
• ​WAC3, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 15-16 September 2007
• ​WAC4 at LREC, Marrakech, Morocco, 1 June 2008
• WAC5 is scheduled for 8 September 2009, San Sebastian, Spain

We invite papers on various topics concerning the use of Web resources for corpus research and NLP applications, including (but not limited to) the following:

• linguistic Web crawler technology and Web corpus collection projects
• applications of Web-derived corpora and other kinds of Web data
• how far does the “easy way” get you? (using search engines, or Google's n-gram lists; we are particularly interested in a critical discussion of the usefulness and limitations of such approaches)
• methods and tools for “cleaning” Web pages to turn them into a corpus (contributors to this topic will be encouraged to participate in the second CLEANEVAL competition to be held in 2009)
• automatic linguistic annotation of Web data: tokenisation, POS tagging, lemmatisation, semantic tagging, etc. (established tools often perform very poorly on Web data)
• search engine architectures for linguists: bringing linguistics to commercial search engines, or high-performance search technology to linguistics?
• search engine-related topics such as result ranking (e.g. how to identify “typical” uses rather than returning 50 very similar matches on the first page)
• duplicate detection, interactive query refinement, etc.
• reviews and clever uses of search engine APIs (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, and in particular Microsoft's current generous LiveSearch API)

Activities

• ​CLEANEVAL, a competition for cleaning webpages
• Mailing list:
  • sign up ​here
  • address to send mail to: sigwac@…

Officers

• Chair: ​Serge Sharoff
• Secretary: ​Marco Baroni

Constitution here​.

Useful resources

• ​Stefan Evert's WAC website
• ​Bill Fletcher's WAC website
• ​Web corpora on Sketchengine
• ​Web corpora on CTS website
• ​WACKY in Forli
• ​A wiki on webgenres