SIGPARSE Report for 2002

Over the period of reporting, June 2001 - June 2002, the activities of
SIGPARSE have, as usual, focussed on matters concerning the biennial
`International Workshop on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series.
Ensuring the continuity of this series is the main aim of SIGPARSE.

The biennial rhythm of the IWPT workshop series (1989-91-93-95-97) was
slightly disturbed in 1999, when it was decided to move the workshop
that had originally been 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 in Trento, Italy.

It was subsequently decided to return to the original rhythm, and to
have the 7th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies in 2001.
It was for the first time held in Asia, at the University of Beijing,
hosted by the Institute for Computational Linguistics, where it took
place on 17-19 October. The preparations and the attendence were hurt
by the September 11 events, which prevented one of the invited
speakers (Michael Collins), several participants, and one of the local
organisers (Fuliang Weng, who had just moved from Beijing to
California) to travel to Beijing for the workshop. As a result,
attendance was slightly less than at the previous workshop. The local
organisation in Beijing was in the very capable hands of a committee
consisting of Shiwen Yu, Houfeng Wang, Fuliang Weng, Youqi Cao and
Qunxin Chen, with the support of Xiajing Bai. The local arrangements
were organised in a truly excellent fashion; the Institute for
Computational Linguistics provided excellent facilities, the staff was
very helpful, and the beautiful campus of the University of Beijing
formed a wonderful setting. Giorgio Satta was program chair and Harry
Bunt general chair; John Carroll advised on many issues arising in the
organisation of the workshop. Aravind Joshi and William Cohen were
invited speakers; Eric de la Clergerie and John Carroll filled in for
Michael Collins and for another speaker who was unable to attend. The
proceedings, containing texts of the 3 invited talks, the 15 accepted
submitted papers, and abstracts of 14 poster presentations, were
available at the workshop.

In the meantime, preparations have started for IWPT'03. The 8th
International Workshop on Parsing Technologies will be held from 23 to
25 April in Nancy, France. Gertjan van Noord will be program chair;
Guy Perrier will be local arrangements chair.

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'). After 8 years of providing this
service, Alon Lavie has per 17 June handed over the monitoring of the
sigparse-list to Kenji Sagae at CMU.

A SIGPARSE website is maintained at the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, by Hendri
Hondorp. This site can be found at
`http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/sigparse/'.

Harry Bunt, June 2002.