2025Q3 Reports: SIGEL
Aditi Chaudhary, Sarah Moeller, Lane Schwartz
SIGEL is ACL's special interest group on Endangered Languages.
MEMBERSHIP
SIGEL was officially approved on Oct. 4, 2019. After 5.5 years, its membership is steady at just over 100. Members must actively renew membership yearly. After a recent renewal, membership is currently at 175.
WORKSHOP (ComputEL-8)
Following up on seven preceding events, we organized the 8th instance of the Workshop on the Use of Computational in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-8) (https://computel-workshop.org/computel-8/)) on March 5-6, 2025, co-located with the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC9) at the University of Hawaii Manoa.
We received 45 submissions as papers or extended abstracts. The conference has continued to held over two days. After a thorough review process, 30 submissions were selected to be presented and 22 were selected to published in the ACL Anthology. As of yet, ACL has not yet released these proceedings.
We welcomed all the participants of the main co-located conference, in this case ICLDC9, to participate in a hybrid format. Co-locating every other year at a linguistics event encourages broad participation. Last year, at EACL, we had an audience of approx. 18 participants in person and another 20 participants online at any given time. This year, we maxed the room limit with 60 people in attendance and another 31 registered to attend online.
Repeating the success of the previous three years, we organized a Special Session, this year entitled "Building Tools Together" (https://computel-workshop.org/special-theme-session-building-tools-together/). We received 11 extended abstracts, of which we accepted 3 presentations. All presentations were by groups exhibiting collaboration between the three constituencies of SIGEL, namely computational linguists, documentary linguists, and members of endangered language communities.
The Organizing Committee for ComputEL-8 consisted of some members of the SIGEL Executive Board as well as other SIGEL members. The committee included representatives of our three constituencies (computational linguists, community members, documentary/descriptive linguists). :
- Sarah Moeller University of Florida (chair)
- Godfred Agyapong, University of Florida (co-chair)
- Daisy Rosenblum, The University of British Columbia (Special Session chair)
- Antti Arppe, University of Alberta (Special Session chair)
- Aditi Chaudhary, Google DeepMind
- Shruti Riwjani, Google DeepMind
- Lane Schwartz, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, USA
- Jordan Lachler, University of Alberta, Canada
- Olivia Waring, University of Hawai’i Mānoa
We intend to submit a workshop proposal to ACL or ELRA to hold the 9th ComputEL in 2026. The program chair and additional co-organzers come from our membership. Two or three new SIGEL members volunteered to serve on the organizing committee.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
In October 2022, we organized the first of the Speaker Series for SIGEL online, which was well attended. This activity continued with irregular events but seems to hold less interest as the pandemic fades in the past. In 2024, we had 5 speakers with an approx. attendance of 20-25 on-line (this event is hosted online and recorded). The events focus on developing orthographies, language documentation fieldwork, and new NLP systems for endangered languages.
We applied to Google for sponsorship and received a second award of $5,000 USD to support participation at our events. We did not receive National Science Foundation to organize a shared activity that would bring together our three communities to work on computational projects that would benefit all three.
This year we will consider submitting workshop proposals to the Institute for Collaborative Language Documentation (CoLANG) to offer NLP/AI training to non-computational and community linguists.
ENDORSEMENTS
During the last 12 months, we did not endorse any other events.
COMMUNICATIONS
SIGEL WEBSITE
We have set up SIGEL's website (https://acl-sigel.github.io/). Our website contains information about our previous and planned future activities, as well as our governance (Executive Board) and up-to-date membership.
TWITTER ACCOUNT
We have a twitter account (@acl_sigel) for disseminating information relevant to SIGEL. It is maintained by a volunteer member.
MAILING LISTS
We have created a Google email for SIGEL: acl.sigel@gmail.com - and a Google Group for the entire SIGEL membership: sigel@googlegroups.com - and for the SIGEL Executive Committee: sigel-ec@googlegroups.com
GOVERNANCE
At the last election for SIGEL in spring 2025, the following persons had been elected for two-year terms, from March 2025 until March 2027.
EXECUTIVE Committee
- President: Lane Schwartz, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (computer science)
- Secretary: Aditi Chaudhary, Google (computer science)
- Members-At-Large:
- Inga Lill Sigga Mikkelsen, UiT - Arctic University of Norway (documentary linguist, indigenous community member)
- Daisy Rosenblum, The University of British Columbia (linguistics/anthropology)
- Jordan Lachler, University of Alberta (linguistics)
- Christopher Cox (computational linguistics)
- Sarah Moeller, University of Florida, Gainesville (Past President) (computational linguistics)
ELECTIONS
We are considering moving our elections to spring instead of winter, because the winter holidays tend to delay the elections.