2003-2004 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 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
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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
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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.