2019Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
Jason Eisner
Membership:
SIGMORPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics. Membership currently stands at 176, notably up from 55/73/90/96/105/120/137/142/144/150/157/167/157 in July 2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017/2018 respectively. We are planning to hold a membership drive to increase membership.
Workshop:
The 15th SIG workshop was held at EMNLP 2018, chaired by Sandra Kübler and Garrett Nicolai. The 16th SIG workshop will be held at ACL 2019, chaired by Garrett Nicolai and Ryan Cotterell. Previous SIGMORPHON custom had the the workshop only occuring in evennumbered years; however, following high participation in 2018, and to accommodate a new shared task, the decision was made to hold an off-year workshop in 2019. The workshop received 20 submissions, accepting 12.
The third edition of the shared task was held at CoNLL 2018, as the CoNLL— SIGMORPHON shared task on universal morphological reinflection. The task consisted of two sub-tasks: the first asked participants to reinflect words in more than 100 languages – the largest such task ever; the second sub-task was the first ever shared task on contextual inflection. The first task received 27 submissions, while the second task received 6. A system overview paper (https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/papers/K/K18/K18-3001/) and individual system description papers appeared in the proceedings for CONLL. 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.
The fourth iteration of the shared task has been organized for this year, but following CoNLL’s tradition of only holding shared tasks in back-to-back years, the task was solely organized by SIGMORPHON, as the SIGMORPHON shared task on crosslinguality and context in morphology. As with previous years, the task consists of two subtasks: the first continues the tradition of context-free inflection, however this year, participants are encouraged to use high-resource language data to aid in the inflection of low-resource languages; the second task expands the contextual inflection task of last year to perform complete contextual morphological tagging. Five teams submitted systems for the first task, while nine participated in the second.
As with previous tasks, a system overview paper and invidual system descriptions will be included in the workshop proceedings. The shared task website is available at (https://sigmorphon.github.io/sharedtasks/2019/. Thanks to Arya D. McCarthy, Ekaterina Vylomova, Shijie Wu, Chaitanya Malaviya, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Garrett Nicolai, Christo Kirov, Miikka Sifverberg, Sebastian J. Mielke, Svetlana Toldova, Olga Lyashevskaya, Karina Mishchenkova, Elena Klyachko, Jeffrey Heinz, Ryan Cotterell, and Mans Hulden 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:
An election of the executive committee of the SIG was held in January, 2019. The newly elected officers of the SIG are listed at (https://sigmorphon.github.io/), and will serve a 2- year term.