1. Statement of Purpose

The languages of the Slavic group play an ever-growing role in NLP, due to their rich cultural heritage, widespread use, and the rapidly expanding consumer markets for NLP solutions for these languages. There are a number of concrete raisons d'être for the Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing, including:

• Over 415 million speakers of Slavic languages around the world;
• The geographic area covered by these speakers is very large (including more than half of Europe);
• From the scientific perspective, the Slavic languages form a unique working ground. They are marked by a striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable shared core vocabulary and inflectional inventory, which span the entire group of languages. These features—despite a lack of mutual intelligibility—create a very special environment, in which researchers can naturally and readily appreciate shared problems and solutions;
• The SIG, as a formal organization, will support the coordination of efforts related to NLP for the Slavic languages.

The purpose of the SIG—the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing—is to:

• Promote interest in basic and applied research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in all Slavic languages, including in areas such as: morphological analysis and generation, syntactic and semantic tagging, named-entity recognition, information extraction, co-reference resolution, question-answering, information retrieval, text summarization, machine translation, sentiment analysis;
• Promote and support of creation of common standards and representations related to NLP in the Slavic languages and inclusion of such standards into relevant infrastructures;
• Provide ACL members who share the interest in Slavic NLP with a platform for exchanging information on current research developments in this area;
• Support, sponsor, facilitate and coordinate efforts related to organization of meetings, workshops and conferences that are relevant to Slavic NLP;
• Create and maintain a repository of resources relevant to research on NLP in Slavic languages, including proceedings, papers, bibliographies, corpora, free publicly available tools and linguistic resources, formats and annotation standards, etc.

SIGSLAV operates within the framework of the ACL's general guidelines for SIGs.

2. Elected Officers

The elected officers of the SIG shall include

• a Chair,
• a Vice-Chair,
• Secretary,
• Resource Managers.

The term of all elected officers of the SIG shall be two (2) years or shorter, if the elected officers organize the elections earlier.

2.1 Chair

The duties of the Chair shall be to:

• have primary executive authority over actions and activities of the SIG;
• prepare a written report on SIGs activities for the Executive Committee of the ACL, for presentation to the ACL at its Annual Business Meeting.

2.2 Vice-Chair

The duties of the Vice-Chair shall be to:

• have secondary executive authority over actions and activities of the SIG (in conjunction with the Chair);
• be the primary facilitator of the meetings/workshops organized by the SIG;
• present an annual report on the SIG finances to the Executive Committee of the ACL;
• request the approval of the ACL Executive Committee for any activities jointly sponsored with any other non-ACL organizations.

2.3 Secretary

The duties of the Secretary shall be to:

• maintain a membership roster of the SIG;
• to act as a Liaison Representative, responsible for communication with members of the SIG and answering inquiries about the SIG;
• communicate with the Executive Committee of the ACL;
• be responsible for relations to other ACL SIGs;
• to call for nominations for elected officers prior to elections;
• to run elections and collect/tally votes during elections.

2.4 Resource Managers

The duties of the Resource Managers shall be to:

• create and maintain a web-based content management system (CMS) with the SIG’s home: hosting official documentation relating to the SIG, the current Constitution, current officer information, membership information, statistics, links to sponsored events, etc.;
• maintain a repository of shared linguistic resources and links to resources related to NLP in Slavic languages;
• be responsible for carrying out activities related to utilisation of financial means awarded to the SIG by the ACL;
• collect and manage any dues that may be required by the organization;
• provide support in the process of preparing annual report on the SIG finances.

At least two (2) Resource Managers shall be appointed.

2.5 International Advisory Committee

The elected officers will nominate an International Advisory Committee that includes at least one representative associated with each primary language of interest. A primary language of interest is here defined as a Slavic language that is also an official language in any state. For a current list, please see the Appendix. The duties of the International Advisory Committee shall consist of:

• planning and coordinating of SIGSLAV activities;
• ratification of the time and venue of meetings, workshops, and conferences.

The Committee shall have at least eight (8) active members.

3. Membership

3.1 Joining

Membership is open to anyone who expresses an interest in NLP in Slavic languages. ACL membership is not required. Membership can be obtained either through provided electronic means or by filling a membership form in conjunction with a SIG meeting. There is no membership fee. Upon joining the new member will be asked to declare her/his primary language of interest. The primary language of interest may be changed at any time; however, a member may be associated with only one primary language of interest at any given time. This information will be used in the Voting procedure (See Clauses 4 and 5).

3.2 Termination

Membership will be terminated on explicit request by the member. Membership termination requests are to be submitted electronically to the Secretary.

4. Elections

All elected officers of the SIG shall be elected by a vote of the membership. If a vacancy occurs among the officers of the SIG, remaining elected officers may nominate a replacement officer who will serve out up to the remainder of the previous office holder's term.

Nominations three months before election

Nominations shall be called at least three (3) months prior to the election, and shall close two (2) months prior to the election. SIG members will be given notice to submit nominations for SIG officers. Candidates must be nominated by two members, must accept nomination, must be in good standing of SIGSLAV.

Voting two months before election

Voting shall commence at least two (2) months before the expiration of the current terms of the officers. All members shall be notified of the election date and the nominations at least four (4) weeks prior to the close of voting. Votes may be entered by electronic or physical mail or other designated means. Votes arriving by the notified closing date will be counted. The votes will be counted by the Secretary or another officer appointed by the International Advisory Committee and agreed to by all candidates.

Announcement of the results

Any nominee receiving a majority of the votes will be declared elected. The results shall be notified to the members within four (4) weeks immediately after the announcement of the results, and the previous officers will remain active for three (3) months to ease the transition. Notification shall signify dispatch of mail by the medium and to the address last notified to the Secretary.

5. Voting Procedure

Voting is decided by majority in two stages:

• Within each sector (official language) majority is tallied across all members affiliated with the sector.
• Across the sectors, majority is tallied, giving one vote per sector.

In the event of a tie, it is resolved by the Chair of the SIG.

Current official languages are listed in the Appendix.

6. Resource Management

In providing and making available any resources as defined in Clause 1, and especially any held and distributed electronically, the SIG shall follow proper procedures with respect to legal matters such as copyright, registration, and data protection as is appropriate to each case. The SIG shall not enter into any formal or potentially legally binding contracts without the approval of ACL Executive Committee (or the ACL Secretary-Treasurer acting under delegated powers). The SIG shall not enter into any financial commitments for such resources without ensuring that the moneys required are available.

Appendix

Current official Slavic languages (in alphabetical order) are:

	Language	Official in State(s)
1.	Belarusian	Belarus
2.	Bosnian	Bosnia and Herzegovina
3.	Bulgarian	Bulgaria
4.	Croatian	Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
5.	Czech	the Czech Republic
6.	Macedonian	Republic of Macedonia
7.	Montenegrin	Montenegro
8.	Polish	Poland
9.	Russian	Russia, Belarus
10.	Serbian	Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
11.	Slovak	Slovakia
12.	Slovene	Slovenia
13.	Ukrainian	Ukraine