2008Q3 Reports: SIGMORPHON
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2007-2008 Annual Report SIGMORPHON (Computational Morphology and Phonology) Jason Eisner MEMBERSHIP ---------- SIGMORPHON is ACL's special interest group for computational morphology, phonology, and phonetics. Membership currently stands at 90, up from 73 at the end of July 2007 and 55 and the end of July 2006. Two years ago, our membership list was 240, but this included many inactive members, including many with non-working email addresses. We cleaned it up by explicitly asking people to re-subscribe. A new SIGMORPHON executive committee was elected in 2008, with 8 candidates running for a maximum of 6 slots. The new committee includes 3 old and 3 new members: Adam Albright, Lynne Cahill, Jason Eisner (president), Jeff Heinz, Greg Kondrak, and Rich Wicentowski (secretary). WORKSHOP -------- We have customarily held workshops in even-numbered years (although in 2007 we also sponsored a successful special workshop on Computing and Historical Phonology). Our 10th SIG workshop is being held at ACL 2008: http://phonology.cogsci.udel.edu/sigmorphon2008/ This is the first workshop that reflects the breadth of SIGMORPHON's new charter, which includes morphology and phonetics as well as phonology. Thus, we were pleased to accept two papers on unsupervised morphological analysis, and to include an invited talk on articulatory modeling for speech recognition. Like a half-dozen ACL workshops this year, we ended up extending our deadline to increase our submission rate. Ultimately, we were able to be reasonably selective, accepting just over half the submissions on first review, and another one contingent on revisions. Still, the ACL may wish to consider the general topic of workshop submission rates. ONLINE ACTIVITIES ----------------- sigmorphon.org serves the community by maintaining a mailing list and online bibliographies at its web site. We plan to continue advertising the SIG's expanded scope in order to recruit new members to the SIG and increase discussion on its mailing list.