2021Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
This is the 2020-2021 annual report for SIGMORPHON, ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics.
Membership
The SIG membership is documented in the following table, observing 11% growth from 157 to 175 members in the past 5 years. We are planning to hold a membership drive to further promote growth of the SIG.
| Year | Membership |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 175 |
| 2020 | 176 |
| 2019 | 176 |
| 2018 | 157 |
| 2017 | 167 |
| 2016 | 157 |
| 2015 | 150 |
| 2014 | 144 |
| 2013 | 142 |
| 2012 | 137 |
| 2011 | 120 |
| 2010 | 105 |
| 2009 | 96 |
| 2008 | 90 |
| 2007 | 73 |
| 2006 | 55 |
Workshop
The 18th SIG workshop will be held at ACL 2021, chaired by Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman and Ryan Cotterell. There is a push now to hold the workshop every year to increase interest in the SIG’s target areas among the wider ACL community. This is especially important now as our community is undergoing rapid growth.
The 2021 Workshop had 25 submissions from which the program committee selected 14 for publication (56% acceptance rate). There will also be invited talks from Kenny Smith, Reut Tsarfaty, Kristine Yu, and Ekaterina Vylomova. This will be the second SIGMORPHON workshop to be held entirely online.
In 2021, SIGMORPHON looked to build off the success of its previous shared tasks, and held an open solicitation for shared tasks, selecting 3. Each task was separately proposed by an organizing committee, and separately approved by the SIG Executive Committee, who worked with the organizing committee in some cases. This structure was inspired by other groups (SIGSEM and SIGNLL) that run multiple shared tasks, and we expect to keep it in future years.
Task 0
SIGMORPHON's sixth installment of its inflection generation shared task is divided into two parts: Generalization, and cognitive plausibility.
In the first part, participants designed a model that learned to generate morphological inflections from a lemma and a set of morphosyntactic features of the target form, similar to previous year's tasks. This year, participants learned morphological tendencies on a set of development languages, and then generalized these findings to new languages - without much time to adapt their models to new phenomena.
The second part asks participants to inflect nonce words in the past tense, which are then judged for plausibility by native speakers. This task aims to investigate whether state-of-the-art inflectors are learning in a way that mimics human learners.
Task 1
The second SIGMORPHON shared task on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion expands on the task from last year, recategorizing data as belonging to one of three different classes: low-resource, medium-resource, and high-resource.
The task saw 23 submissions from 9 participants.
Task 2
Task 2 continues the effort from the 2020 shared task in unsupervised morphology. Unlike last year's task, which asked participants to implement a complete unsupervised morphology induction pipeline, this year's task concentrates on a single aspect of morphology discovery: paradigm induction. This task asks participants to cluster words into inflectional paradigms, given no more than raw text.
Other Activities (Online)
Mentorship program
This year saw the continuation of a mentorship program, which will take place at ACL. Due to the fact that ACL 2021 will be held online, the mentorship program is virtual; if they take place, future iterations should also be in person. The program was spearheaded by Ryan Cotterell, but at the suggestion of Kyle Gorman who forwarded a request from a SIGMOPHON member inquiring if such a program is possible to the SIGMORPHON Exec. Interested mentees were advised to sign up online on a Google form [1], and were paired with more senior researchers who will serve as mentors to them. At the time of writing, 10 people have signed up; all who signed up were either graduate students or prospective graduate students; some did not have papers at the conference. One mentee who signed up early has been paired so far; we are working on pairing the rest. The success of the program will not be known until after the workshop in July, but this early success suggests that we should run the program again next year.
Membership drive
With the successful migration of the mailing list to Google groups, we are expecting to conduct the planned membership drive in the coming year.
Elections
An election of the executive committee of the SIG was held in January, 2021. The elected officers of the SIG are listed at [2], and are serving a 2-year term. The next elections are scheduled to take place in January, 2023.