2003-2004 Annual Report SIGPHON (Computational Phonology) Jason Eisner MEMBERSHIP ---------- SIGPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational phonology. Membership currently stands at 240 (previous years: 237, 214, 190, 176) with 58 declaring computational phonology as their "primary" interest (previous years: 53, 47, 39, 36). A new SIGPHON executive committee was elected in 2003, consisting of 3 old and 3 new members. WORKSHOP -------- Our seventh biannual workshop will be held at ACL 2004. The program was chaired by Richard Wicentowski and John Goldsmith and features 11 peer-reviewed papers. Note that since 2002 we have explicitly invited papers on computational morphology as well as phonology. ONLINE ACTIVITIES ----------------- SIGPHON continues to serve the community by maintaining a mailing list and online bibliographies at its web site, http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/sigphon/ . FUTURE PLANS ------------ SIGPHON is interested in continuing to increase connections with related communities, such as morphology, speech technology, and "pure" phonology. The new executive committee includes a computational morphologist and a speech technologist, as well as the linguist John Goldsmith. There is no ACL SIG devoted to computational morphology. SIGPHON's last workshop focused on morphological and phonological learning; this summer's workshop was also opened to morphology papers. We may consider expanding our charter to cover morphology as well as phonology. This arguably forms a natural interest group, as the two problems are somewhat intertwined, especially when dealing with corpus data. Consolidating the two communities would increase submissions and attendance at our workshops. We would be interested in the thoughts of the ACL Exec on this question. We hope to arrange for a special issue of a journal such as _Phonology_, focusing on the contribution of computational phonology to phonology proper. We are also considering holding our next workshop at a linguistics conference such as the LSA.