View source for 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.

=== Shared Tasks: ===

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.