2020Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE

Election of Officers

At the end of 2019, a new set of officers have been elected, which will serve until December 2022 (i.e. for a term of three years):

• Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo (President)
• Kenji Sagae, University of California at Davis (Secretary)
• Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
• Weiwei Sun, Peking University
• Anders Søgaard, University of Copenhagen
• Reut Tsarfaty, Open University of Israel

Membership

In July 2020, there are 256 registered members.

Recent Events

For 2020, SIGPARSE decided to try something new, where the original plan was not to go virtual but rather to increase points of contact with the larger ACL community by co-locating with one of the major conference.

IWPT 2020 was accepted as a one-day event to be held on July 9, 2020, in conjunction with ACL 2020 (in Seattle, WA, USA). Despite much uncertainty around the 2020 conference season at the time (due to the global pandemic caused by the novel corona virus), IWPT received a healthy number of high-quality submissions (comparable in number to previous years, but arguably somewhat stronger in quality), and the virtual-only event ended up with a good scientific programme (including an invited talk by Paola Merlo). Also new in 2020, IWPT has started a series of high-profile parsing-related shared tasks; the inaugural IWPT 2020 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies was chaired by Gosse Bouma, Djamé Seddah, and Dan Zeman; the task attracted submissions from ten teams.

Technical Infrastructure

In the second half of 2019, SIGPARSE established its own domain http://www.sigparse.org and has moved its web site, mailing list, and conference pages there. Stephan Oepen (current SIGPARSE President) is the owner of the sigparse.org domain, for now.