2020Q3 Reports: SIGTYP

Summary

SIGTYP is ACL's special interest group on linguistic typology.

President: Ekaterina Vylomova

Secretary: Ryan Cotterell

At Large: Eitan Grossman, Edoardo M. Ponti, Alexis Palmer

Membership

The SIG was officially approved on Dec, 28 2019. Over the last 6 months, the total number of members has reached 190. We are planning to hold a membership drive to further promote growth within the SIG.

Workshop

In summer 2019 we organized the first workshop on typology for polyglot NLP (co-located with ACL 2019). In total, 48 attendees registered for the workshop (excluding organizers and keynote speakers). The SIGTYP 2020 workshop will be co-located with (virtual) EMNLP 2020. We expect to have at least 70-80 participants.

Organizers:

Haim Dubossarsky
Arya D. McCarthy	
Edoardo M. Ponti
Ivan Vulić
Ekaterina Vylomova
Yevgeni Berzak
Ryan Cotterell     
Eitan Grossman	
Anna Korhonen
Roi Reichart 

Keynote Speakers:

Miriam Butt
Yulia Tsvetkov
Richard Sproat
Bill Croft (Tent.)
Harald Hammarström 

Shared Tasks

In 2020, SIGTYP offered a shared task on the prediction of typological features using WALS data. In the task, we addressed one major issue with WALS: the sparsity and skewness of its feature annotations. We asked the participants to build systems that utilize correlations between features and similarity between languages to make predictions about which features held-out languages have. In total, 5 teams participated in the task. We are currently processing their results.

Other Activities (Online)

SIGTYP website and logo

We developed SIG’s website ([1]). It is constantly being updated with new information on workshops, shared tasks, members, and other information. We also designed a group’s logo: [2]

SIGTYP digest ([3])

Each month we invite members of the community to submit short abstracts or summaries of their recent papers to our monthly newsletter. This allows keeping track of the progress in the field and promoting everyone’s work.

Twitter account ([4])

We engage more members by keeping our Twitter account constantly updated with retweets of recent papers, talks, and other materials on linguistic typology, multilinguality, and low-resource NLP.

Mailing Lists

We created organizational structure for SIGTYP, e.g. Google groups for: 1) SIGTYP members; 2) SIGTYP Exec; 3) SIGTYP shared task organizers.

Elections

As secretary, Ryan Cotterell will be organizing the elections over the coming months. He is going to follow Garrett Nicolai's procedure at SIGMORPHON for remote voting.