2023Q3 Reports: SIGTYP

The SIG was officially approved on Dec, 28 2019. As of July 2023, the total number of members has reached 449. 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).

In autumn (November) 2020, we ran the second (virtual) workshop on computational research in linguistic typology (co-located with EMNLP 2020). In total, ~50 attendees registered for the workshop.

In summer (July) 2021, we organized the third (virtual) workshop on computational typology and multilingual NLP (co-located with NAACL 2021). We developed our own virtual infrastructure (https://sigtyp.github.io/ws2021-schedule.html), ran several sessions during 24 hours to allow members from different time zones attend any session they prefer. According to our records, in total ~130 unique participants attended the sessions.

In July 2022, we organized the fourth (hybrid) workshop on computational typology and multilingual NLP (co-located with NAACL 2022 that took place in Seattle). We developed our own virtual infrastructure (https://sigtyp.github.io/ws2022-sigtyp-schedule.html). According to the NAACL 2022 workshop chairs, ~70 ACL members registered for the workshop. According to our records, there were about 60-70 participants in the in-person part, and ~60 unique participants attended the virtual session.

In May 2023, we organized the fifth (hybrid) workshop on computational typology and multilingual NLP (co-located with EACL 2023 that took place in Dubrovnik). We developed our own virtual infrastructure (https://sigtyp.github.io/ws2023-sigtyp-schedule.html). According to our records, there were about ~60 participants in the in-person part, and ~20-30 unique participants attended the virtual session.

Organizers of the SIGTYP 2023 workshop:

Lisa Beinborn, Koustava Goswami, Saliha Muradoğlu, Alexey Sorokin, Ritesh Kumar, Andreas Shcherbakov, Edoardo M Ponti, Ryan Cotterell, Ekaterina Vylomova

Keynote Speakers:

Ella Rabinovich, Natalia Levshina

Proceedings: https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2023.sigtyp-1/

Later this year, we will have a second event organized under the SIGTYP umbrella, The Third Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL): https://sigtyp.github.io/ws2023-mrl.html Organizers of the MRL 2023 workshop:

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Duygu Ataman, Chris Emezue, Omer Goldman, Hila Gonen, Sebastian Ruder, Gözde Gül Şahin, Francesco Tinner, Genta Indra Winata

Shared Tasks

In 2023, SIGTYP offered a Shared Task on Cognate and Derivative Detection for Low-Resourced Languages. Organizers of the SIGTYP 2023 Shared Task:

Priya Rani, Koustava Goswami, Adrian Doyle, Bernardo Stearns, Theodorus Fransen, John P. McCrae

Overview: https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigtyp-1.13/

We are also currently running a shared task associated with the MRL workshop, The 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-level Morphology: https://sigtyp.github.io/st2022-mrl.html

Organizers of the MRL 2022 Shared Task:

Omer Goldman, Reut Tsarfaty, Djame Seddah, Benjamin Muller, Benoît Sagot, Hila Gonen, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov, Kelechi Ogueji,Francesco Tinner, Duygu Ataman

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 Lecture Series ([3])

IN 2021, every week we invite a speaker either from NLP or linguistic typology to present their research. We pre-record the talk in four ~15min parts and then play them having live discussions after each. For this purpose, we created our own Youtube and Bilibili (China) channels.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaSWMbnmduXYlbWGEWLedww/about

Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/1055445444

SIGTYP Lecture Hosts:

Olga Zamaraeva, Joe Brucker, Eleanor Chodroff, Pranav A, Ekaterina Vylomova, Ryan Cotterell

We are planning to continue this activity in the second half of 2022.

SIGTYP digest ([4])

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.

Editors:

Ekaterina Vylomova, Pranav A, Eleanor Chodroff, Tiago Pimentel, Ryan Cotterell

Twitter account ([5])

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. As of July 2022, we have 1071 followers.

Managers:

Ekaterina Vylomova, Ryan Cotterell, Joe Brucker, Edoardo M Ponti

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.