Constitution | SIGVAR – ACL Special Interest Group on Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects

Constitution of the ACL Special Interest Group on Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (SIGVAR)

I. Statement of Purpose

Estimates point to over 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Only a small fraction of these languages is well-represented in NLP research with foundational models, corpora, and resources. Many of these languages have multiple national language varieties and dialects, often without a written standard.

The purpose of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group on Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (SIGVAR) is to promote interest in all aspects of language variation and multilingualism, especially diatopic variation. More specifically, SIGVAR aims to promote research on the processing of low-resource languages, varieties, and dialects, including but not limited to morphological analysis and generation, orthographic normalization, syntactic parsing, corpus annotation and benchmark creation, semantic and pragmatic analysis, dialectometry, optical character recognition, machine translation, information retrieval, information extraction, text analytics, language modelling, and speech processing. SIGVAR also aims to promote coordination between organizations in academia and industry throughout the world performing research on computational approaches related to language variation, whether they come from computational linguistics, natural language processing, speech processing, dialectology, or variationist linguistics. Furthermore, SIGVAR aims to provide ACL members who are interested in low-resource languages, language varieties, and dialects with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest. Finally, SIGVAR will sponsor regular, timely and worthwhile meetings and workshops on this topic, such as the VarDial workshop.

SIGVAR will operate within the framework of the ACL’s general guidelines for SIGs.

II. Membership & Dues

Membership is open to anyone who professes an interest in research on computational models, low-resource languages, language varieties, and dialects. It does not require ACL membership. The membership can be obtained either through provided electronic means or by filling out a membership form in conjunction with a SIG meeting.

Membership will be terminated on request, or automatically if no reply is received within 2 months of a yearly membership renewal request. Termination requests are to be communicated by email to the SIGVAR Secretary. Automatically terminated memberships will be reinstated on request.

SIGVAR does not charge dues to its members.

III. Elected Officers

The elected officers of the SIG shall consist of a President, a Secretary and a Treasurer. These shall be members in good standing of the ACL. The term of all elected officers of the SIG shall be 3 years or shorter if the elected officers organize the elections earlier.

President – The duties of the President are:

To have primary executive authority over actions and activities of the SIG.
To serve as Liaison Representative and be primarily responsive for communication with the Executive Committee of the ACL.
To prepare written reports on the activities of the SIG for the Executive Committee of the ACL, for presentation to the ACL at its Annual Business Meeting.
To designate a Resource Manager and indicate members to serve in the Advisory Committee.

Secretary – The duties of the Secretary are:

To set up, maintain and administer a mailing list to ease communication with and among members of the SIG.
To answer inquiries about the SIG.
To maintain a membership roster of the SIG.
To conduct elections as mandated below.

Treasurer – The duties of the Treasurer are:

To be responsible for any funds awarded to the SIG by the ACL or other entities.
To collect and manage any dues that may be required by the organization.
To present a written annual report on the SIG finances to the Executive Committee of the ACL.

IV. Other Representatives

The President designates a Resource Manager who may be a member of the community at large or one of the standing SIG officers.

The SIGVAR will be supported by an Advisory Committee of leading researchers of diatopic language variation from across the world who represent a wide variety of regions, languages, dialects, and research interests.

Resource Manager – The duties of the Resource Manager are:

To create a webpage with the statement of purpose, constitution, current officer information.
To handle resources that are made available through the web.

Advisory Committee – The duties of the Advisory Committee are:

To advise on planning and coordination of SIGVAR activities with other ACL SIGs and non-ACL organizations.
To support the election processes of the SIG through volunteering to serve on the Election Committee.

V. Election of Officers

Voters – All elected officers of SIGVAR will be elected by a vote of the current SIGVAR members.

Election Timeline – The timeline of the elections is based on the expiration of the current terms of the officers (time n).

n-4 months - Selection of the Election Committee.
n-3 months - Nominations open for 1 month.
n-2 months - Voting opens for 1 month.
n-1 months - The election results are announced.

Election Committee – The election process will be managed by a three-member Election Committee formed by the SIG Secretary and two volunteer members from the Advisory Committee. Members of the Election Committee cannot run for elected positions in the elections they manage. If the SIG Secretary is running for election, a third volunteer from the Advisory Committee will take the place of the SIG Secretary.

Nominations – All SIG members will be given notice to submit nominations for SIG officers at the time nominations open and 2 weeks before their closing. Candidates must be nominated by two members, and must accept the nomination. Candidates must be current members in good standing in SIGVAR and in good standing in ACL. Candidates need to provide a CV and short biography to be shared with all the voting members on the SIGVAR website.

Voting – All SIGVAR members will be given notice to vote on SIG officers at the time voting opens and 2 weeks before its closing. Votes will be entered by electronic means. Votes arriving by the notified closing date will be counted.

Announcing the Results – The results shall be notified to the active members within 2 weeks immediately after the closing of the votes. The previous officers will remain active for 2 months into the next term to ease the transition.

Unexpected Vacancy – If a vacancy occurs among the SIG officers, the remaining two elected officers will each nominate a replacement officer from among the Advisory Committee members to serve out up to the remainder of the previous office holder’s term. The Advisory Committee will vote on the nominees to identify the replacement officer.

VI. Ethical Considerations

SIGVAR supports research that extends useful technologies to more language varieties and speakers than are currently served by language technologies. SIGVAR also seeks to foster the development and release of open-source datasets.

SIGVAR recognizes potential ethical and dual-use issues in the context of processing low-resource language data (e.g., technologies generating non-standard dialects can be perceived as parodying the dialect, and people might use non-standard dialects in order for their language not to be understood by technologies). SIGVAR aims to raise awareness of such issues (e.g., in the calls for papers for associated workshops) and encourages research and resource development that centers the wants and needs of the relevant speaker communities.