SIGPARSE
Harry Bunt

Over the period June 2000 - June 2001, the activities of SIGPARSE 
have, as usual,  focussed on matters concerning the biennial 
`International Workshop on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series.

In addition, SIGPARSE gives its sponsorship to appropriate workshops
and conferences; this happened last year for the workshop on 
Chinese Language Processing that took place in conjunction with 
ACL-2000 in Hong Kong.

The biennial rhythm of the IWPT workshop series (1989-91-93-95-97) was
slightly disturbed in 1999/2000, when it was decided to move the
workshop, originally scheduled for late 1999, to 2000 for fear of
logistic problems relating to the millenium change. The 6th
International Workshop on Parsing Technologies thus became IWPT 2000
rather then IWPT'99; it took place at the Institute for Research in
Science and Technology (IRST) in Trento, Italy. The organisation was
in the hands of John Carroll as program chair, Alberto Lavelli as
local arrangements chair, and Harry Bunt as general chair. The
workshop had approximately the same number of participants as the
previous IWPT (between 60 and 70), and enjoyed a satisfactory number
of submitted papers from which a high-quality selection of 23 papers
was made that were presented at the workshop, supplemented with 17
posters. Invited talks were given by Martin Kay, Eric Brill and
Giorgio Satta. The proceedings, containing the 23 accepted papers,
summary versions of the invited talks, and abstracts of the posters
were available at the workshop. The local arrangements were organised
in an excellent fashion, and the workshop may be considered quite
successful. 

Shortly afterwards, the preparations started for the 7th International
Workshop on Parsing Technologies, with the idea to return to the
original rhythm and have it in 2001, for the first time in
Asia. IWPT'01 will take place in Beijing, China, on 17-19 October this
year. The organization is in the hands of a local arrangements 
committee co-chaired by Fuliang Weng and Shiwen Yu, program committee
chair Giorgio Satta, and Harry Bunt as general chair.

An edited and revised collection of selected papers from the 5th
International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'97) has been 
published as the book "Advances in Probabilistic and Other Parsing 
Technologies", Harry Bunt and Anton Nijholt, editors; Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht 2000 (series Text, Speech and Language
Technology). This book is a sequel to the two volumes based on 
workshops in the IWPT series that were published earlier: "Current 
Issues in Parsing Technology" (Masaru Tomita, ed.; Kluwer Academic 
Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht 1991), based on IWPT'89, and "Recent 
Advances in Parsing Technology" (Harry Bunt and Masaru Tomita, eds.; 
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht 1996), based on IWPT'93. 

During the period reported here, Harry Bunt (Tilburg University) has 
continued as SIGPARSE officer. Alon Lavie at CMU has been most helpful 
in continuing to maintain the active SIGPARSE email list 
(`sigparse-project@cs.cmu.edu'). John Carroll has on several occasions
advised on sigparse matters. A SIGPARSE website is maintained at the 
Department of Computer Science at the University of Twente in Enschede, 
the Netherlands. This site can be found at 
`http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/sigparse/'.

SIGPARSE has always been a very loosely organized SIG without any
formalized structure. During IWPT 2000 the question was discussed 
whether this should change. It was generally felt that the informal
organization works well and should remain that way.