2021 shared task update

[Ryan Cotterell]

Dear All,

I wanted to give an update on our shared task. We are going to title the task "Generalization in Morphological Inflection," a title due to @Maria Ryskina. The task will have two parts. The first is the annotation of nonce inflections, which will be crowdsourced. This part studies the generalization to unseen words. The second is the generalization to unseen languages, which is an echo of this year's task on typological diversity. 

SIGMORPHON intends to accept all reasonable proposals this year from what I understand so I suspect we should bet on the task being part of SIGMORPHON. However, this is not official. 

The author list on the shared task will be all those who organize it plus all those who annotated new data for it. We made a division into logistics and data annotation last year [https://sigmorphon.github.io/sharedtasks/2020/task0/], but this distinction didn't matter with respect to the author order. We added more authors when some people offered to do data analysis on the participants' systems. In general, we will be very generous with authorship as the primary motivation of the task is to provide standard datasets for the community and it is very much a community effort. 

Most of the data annotation effort is happening through various working groups UniMorph has been trying to set up. We will see with time how this works out. 

I think @Katerina Willamow volunteered to lead the proposal writing for SIGMORPHON and I suspect she will be the first author on this year's shared task paper as well.

Thanks,

--Ryan