2016Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
2015-2016 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 157, up from 55/73/90/96/105/120/137/142/144/150 in July 2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015 respectively.
Workshop
We will be holding our 15th SIG workshop at ACL 2016, chaired by Micha Elsner and Sandra Kübler. It received 23 paper submissions and will also feature our first Shared Task. Note that we customarily hold workshops in even-numbered years.
SIGMORPHON offered its first shared task this year, on morphological reinflection. The task is to alter an inflected verb to express different morphological properties, for example, converting the string ran to running or the string digo to dirás. This requires both analysis and synthesis of inflected verb forms. Systems were evaluated on 3 metrics across 10 languages: Arabic, Finnish, Georgian, German, Navajo, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and two surprise languages, Hungarian and Maltese. Different tracks allowed different amounts or types of training data. The shared task received 11 systems from 9 teams. An overview paper as well as individual system description papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.
The shared task website is at [1], including datasets that can be used by others. Thanks to Ryan Cotterell and Jason Eisner for designing the shared task, and to Mans Hulden, Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, and David Yarowsky for organizing the competition and preparing datasets.
We hope to propose a related task for the CoNLL 2017 shared task.
Online Activities
We have recently harvested metadata for 385 relevant papers that appeared in ACL Anthology from 2011-2015. After updating this with 2016 papers, we plan to use this list for a membership drive. Many of the authors are not current SIG members. We hope that this will increase activity on the mailing list and participation in the workshop.
We may also release a bibliography of these papers. We hope that at some point, the ACL Anthology will begin to suport topic IDs on papers, to facilitate topical browsing and search; see our thoughts on this at 2015Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON.
Elections
Our current board's term expired on February 4, 2016. We are thus overdue for elections.
The current SIG secretary (Greg Kondrak) argues that shifting the election schedule would be wise, so that the new exec members are elected in time to assume duties such as running the workshop.