2018Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
Jason Eisner
Membership:
SIGMORPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics. Membership currently stands at (157), slightly down from 55/73/90/96/105/120/137/142/144/150/157/167 in July 2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017 respectively. We are planning to hold a membership drive to increase membership.
Workshop:
The 15th SIG workshop will be held at EMNLP 2018, chaired by Sandra Kübler and Garrett Nicolai. Following the custom of the SIG, workshops are typically held in even-numbered years.
The second edition of the SIGMORPHON shared task was held at CoNLL 2017, as the CoNLL-SIGMORPHON shared task on universal morphological inflection. The task consisted of two sub-tasks: morphological reinflection, and morphological paradigm completion. The 24 systems from 11 participating teams were evaluated on a set of 52 typologically and geographically diverse languages, with varying amounts of training data.
A system overview paper (https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/papers/cotterell+al.conll17.pdf), as well as individual system description papers appeared in the workshop proceedings. The shared task website is available at (https://sigmorphon.github.io/sharedtasks/2017/), and we expect the datasets to be adopted by the community for various sequence-to-sequence tasks. Thanks to Ryan Cotterell, Jason Eisner, Mans Hulden, Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, David Yarowsky, Géraldine Walther, Ekaterina Vylomova, Patrick Xia, and Manall Faruqui for organizing the task.
A third edition of the shared task has been organized for this year, again jointly held with CoNLL coinciding with the SIG workshop and CoNLL. Along with expanding the language set to more than 100 languages for the reinflection task, the shared task will also include a sub-task on contextual inflection for the first time. As with previous shared tasks, a task overview paper, as well as individual system papers, will be included in the workshop proceedings. The shared task website is available at (https://sigmorphon.github.io/sharedtasks/2018/). Thanks to Ryan Cotterell, Mans Hulden, Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, Géraldine Vylomova, Arya McCarthy, Katharina Kann, Sebastian Mielke, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg, David Yarowsky, and Jason Eisner for organizing the task.
Online Activities:
We have recently harvested metadata for hundreds of relevant papers that appeared in the ACL Anthology from 2011-2017. We plan to use this to hold a membership drive in the next year.
Elections:
Current officers of the SIG are listed at (https://sigmorphon.github.io/). Elections will be held at the end of the current year for a two-year term.