2001-2002 Annual Report
SIGPHON (Computational Phonology)
Jason Eisner
MEMBERSHIP
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SIGPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational phonology.
Membership currently stands at 214 (up from 190 last year and 176 the
year before), with 47 members (up from 39 and 36) declaring
computational phonology as their "primary" interest.
WORKSHOP
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SIGPHON generally runs biannual workshops. The workshop at ACL-02,
chaired by Mike Maxwell, has the theme "Morphological and Phonological
Learning" and is cosponsored by SIGNLL. This is SIGPHON's sixth
workshop. The program includes an invited talk and 8 papers. It
features 2 invited papers by academic linguists, in keeping with our
desire (mentioned in last year's report) to increase crosstalk with
the pure linguistics community.
ONLINE ACTIVITIES
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SIGPHON continues to serve the community by maintaining a mailing list
and online bibliographies at its web site, www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/sigphon/.
Thanks to the efforts of the SIG's secretary, Steven Bird, the mailing
list will soon be integrated with the LINGUIST list, which provides
list archiving, search, and broader exposure.
FUTURE PLANS
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The Executive Committee hopes to arrange for a special issue of a
journal such as _Phonology_, focused on the contribution of
computational phonology to phonology proper. To further highlight the
relevance of computational phonology to practicing phonologists, we
are considering holding our next workshop at a linguistics conference
such as the LSA.