2024Q3 Reports: SIGEL

Sarah Moeller and Aditi Chaudhary

SIGEL is ACL's special interest group on Endangered Languages.

MEMBERSHIP

SIGEL was officially approved on Oct. 4, 2019. After 4.5 years, its membership has stayed around 100. Members must actively renew membership yearly. After a recent renewal, membership is currently at 94.

WORKSHOP (ComputEL-7)

Following up on six preceding events, we organized, in fully online format, the 7th instance of the Workshop on the Use of Computational in the Study of Endangered Languages ComputEL-7 (https://computel-workshop.org/computel-7/)) on March 21-22, 2024, "co-located" with the (EACL).

We received 34 submissions as papers or extended abstracts or submissions to the Special Session. We were able to hold two days like last year. After a thorough review process, 19 submissions were selected to be presented and 13 were selected to published in the ACL Anthology excluding the extended abstracts.

As we had done previously, we welcomed all the participants of the main conference, in this case EACL, to take part in ComputEL-7 in a hybrid format encourage as broad participation as possible. We had an audience of approx. 18 participants in person and another 20 participants online at any given time.

Repeating the success of the previous two years, we organized a Special Session on Partnerships in Practice (https://computel-workshop.org/computel-7/special-theme-session-partnerships-in-practice/). We received 14 extended abstracts, of which we accepted 9 presentations. All presentations were by groups exhibiting collaboration between the three constituencies of SIGEL, namely computational linguists, documentary linguists, and members of endangered language communities.

The Organizing Committee for ComputEL-7 consisted of some members of the SIGEL Executive Board as well as other SIGEL members. The committee included representatives of our three constituencies (computational linguists, community members, documentary/descriptive linguists):

• Sarah Moeller University of Florida (chair)
• Godfred Agyapong, University of Florida (co-chair)
• Christopher Cox, Carleton University (co-chair)
• Daisy Rosenblum, The University of British Columbia (Special Session chair)
• Antti Arppe, University of Alberta (Special Session chair)
• Aditi Chaudhary, Google DeepMind
• Alexis Palmer, University of North Texas
• Shruti Riwjani, Google DeepMind
• Ryan Henke, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Lane Schwartz, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, USA

The Program Committee for ComputEL-7 can be found in the ACL published proceedings.

We intend to hold the 8th ComputEL col-located with the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation on March 3-4, 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The program chair and additional co-organzers come from our membership.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

In October 2022, we organized the first of the Speaker Series for SIGEL online, which was well attended. We have continued this activity with irregular events as frequently as once a month, having had 9 speakers so far and approx. attendance of 25-30. The events focus on developing orthographies, language documentation fieldwork, and new NLP systems for endangered languages.

We applied to Google for sponsorship and received $10,000 USD to support participation at our events. We applied to the National Science Foundation for sponsorship so that we could organize a shared activity that would bring together our three communities to work on computational projects that would benefit all three. This funding is pending.

ENDORSEMENTS

During the last 12 months, we did not endorse any other events.

COMMUNICATIONS

SIGEL WEBSITE

We have set up SIGEL's website (https://acl-sigel.github.io/). Our website contains information about our previous and planned future activities, as well as our governance (Executive Board) and up-to-date membership.

TWITTER ACCOUNT

We have created a twitter account (@acl_sigel) for disseminating information relevant to SIGEL. It is maintained by a volunteer member.

MAILING LISTS

We have created a Google email for SIGEL: acl.sigel@gmail.com - and a Google Group for the entire SIGEL membership: sigel@googlegroups.com - and for the SIGEL Executive Committee: sigel-ec@googlegroups.com

GOVERNANCE

At the last election for SIGEL in fall 2022, the following persons had been elected for two-year terms, from January 2023 until January 2025.

EXECUTIVE Committee

• President: Sarah Moeller, University of Florida, Gainesville
• Secretary: Aditi Chaudhary, Google
• Members-At-Large:
  • Alexis Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Hilaria Cruz, University of Louisville
  • Jordan Lachler, University of Alberta
  • Lane Schwartz, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Antti Arppe, University of Alberta (Past President)

ELECTIONS

The next elections are due to take place by winter 2024.