2024Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
This is the 2023-2024 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 36% growth from 176 to 239 members in the past 5 years. In particular, the last 3 years have seen significant growth in the SIG.
| Year | Membership |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 239 |
| 2023 | 218 |
| 2022 | 196 |
| 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 21st SIG workshop was held at NAACL 2024, organized by Garrett Nicolai, Eleanor Chodroff, Çağrı Çöltekin, and Fred Mailhot. Attendance was approximately 30 participants, in-person and online. This is a decrease in attendance, and we will be investigating ways that we can increase participation.
The 2023 Workshop had 15 submissions (a decrease of 33% over the previous year) from which the program committee selected 9 for publication (60% acceptance rate). There were two invited talks: Naomi Feldman, and Jian Zhu. The workshop was held in a hybrid format, with both live attendees at NAACL, and virtual attendees via Zoom.
In 2024, SIGMORPHON 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. For the first time, the shared tasks were separated from the main workshop, with a separate volume of the proceedings devoted to the shared tasks, and a virtual event for participants.
SIGMORPHON's Ninth installment of its inflection generation shared task concentrated on the efficient generation of morphological paradigms, simulating the work done in field linguistics.
The second installment of its subword tokenization shared task concentrated on the segmentation of words into subword units using small language models.
The third installment of its G2P shared task concentrated on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme prediction, but unfortunately, did not receive any submissions.
Elections
The officers of the SIG are listed on the website: https://sigmorphon.github.io/. Officers are serving a 2-year term, and the next election cycle will begin at the end of 2024.