2015Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
2014-2015 Annual Report
SIGMORPHON (Computational Morphology, Phonology, and Phonetics)
Jason Eisner
Membership
SIGMORPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics. Membership currently stands at 150, up from 55/73/90/96/105/120/137/142/144 in July 2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014 respectively.
Workshop
We held a full-day joint workshop with SIGFSM at ACL 2014 (website, proceedings).
We have customarily held workshops in even-numbered years. In keeping with this schedule, we will propose to hold our 15th SIG workshop at one of the 2016 conferences.
We plan to offer the first SIGMORPHON shared task in conjunction with our 2016 workshop. The topic is morphological reinflection. A meeting about this was held at NAACL 2015, and we will soon solicit feedback from SIG members. Thanks to Ryan Cotterell for taking lead. A draft website is at [1].
Online Activities
We discovered recently that several current authors publishing on SIGMORPHON topics are not on the SIG's mailing list. To update the mailing list, we plan to harvest a list of recent papers and contact the authors. We will also encourage people to join the mailing list when we advertise the shared task via ACL.
Our secretary, Greg Kondrak, has recently transitioned the SIGMORPHON website to a new host, but it does not have much up-to-date content other than the executive committee and the membership list.
We believe that it might be useful for SIGs in general to maintain annotated or unannotated guides to the literature, if these can be made sufficiently accurate and prominent that they would be used. In 2011, SIGMORPHON experimented with producing highlighted versions of the ACL and EMNLP conference programs, which marked the papers relevant to our SIG. We emailed these to the SIG members in advance of the conference and archived them on the SIG website. Unfortunately, this was labor-intensive and required idiosyncratically hacking the HTML program for each conference. In addition, resources that are hosted only at the SIG website may be overlooked.
As we noted in last year's SIG report, we would welcome some guidance and technical support for such endeavors. The ACL Anthology editor (Min-Yen Kan) has proposed in the past that each SIG could maintain a bibliography that linked into the Anthology. Alternatively, the SIGs might assist efforts such as Searchbench @ DFKI, AAN @ UMich, and Saffron @ Deri in identifying topical papers. In principle, topic identifiers for each paper could be produced as part of the conference workflow, especially as related information is already generated at several points in the conference process (authors select keywords, and then program chairs assign submitted papers to tracks and accepted oral papers to sessions). Thus, the final topic IDs might be produced by the program chairs, area chairs, and/or publication chairs. An alternative would be to use automated methods across the Anthology, such as topic modeling, semi-supervised learning, or simple keyword lists that could be matched against the paper abstracts.
Elections
Our current board's term will expire on February 4, 2016. In keeping with the SIG Constitution, we will hold new elections on the following schedule:
- Friday, November 6, 2015 (or sooner): Nominations solicited
- Friday, December 4, 2015 (or sooner): Voting opens (for any contested positions)
- Thursday, February 4, 2016: Voting closes