About the SIG

The purpose of SIGSLAV: the ACL Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing, is to stimulate research in NLP and creation of linguistic resources for the Slavic languages.

The creation of SIGSLAV was motivated by the rich cultural heritage of the Slavic people. Although close to half a billion of people speak these languages, they are not yet well represented in the NLP community.

Creation

Inspired by the successes of the Workshops on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing (BSNLP), which have been gathering since 2007, the idea for creating a special interest group on NLP for Slavic languages was suggested and discussed among the participants of the BSNLP Workshop in Sofia, Bulgaria, in August 2013. The idea gained significant support from leading researchers in the field of Slavic NLP, in particular, with the goal of streamlining the efforts toward promoting Slavic NLP. A formal proposal to create a SIG dedicated to Slavic NLP, with a list of supporters, was submitted to ACL in August 2014. On 27 November 2014 the ACL approved our proposal, and SIGSLAV became a reality.