2010Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE
SIGPARSE Annual Report, June 2010
SIGPARSE is ACL's special interest group on natural language parsing. The main goal and activity of SIGPARSE is to ensure the continuity of the biennial 'International Conferences on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series. The last conference was the 11th in the series, held in October 2009 in Paris, France. For IWPT 2009, SIGPARSE returned to the standalone format used from 1989 to 2003, after co-locating the meeting with larger conferences in 2005 (EMNLP-HLT) and 2007 (ACL). Harry Bunt served as General Chair, and Eric de la Clergerie as Program Chair. IWPT 2009 featured 41 papers (14 full papers and 27 short papers) covering a wide range of current topics in parsing technology research, three invited speakers (Mark Johnson from Brown University, now at Macquarie University, John Carroll from the University of Sussex, and Joakim Nivre from the University of Uppsala), and a discussion panel on statistical parsing for morphologically-rich languages, chaired by Josef van Genabith.
Following significant interest in the discussion panel held at IWPT 2009, the first non-IWPT SIGPARSE-endorsed workshop was held at NAACL-HLT 2010 in Los Angeles, on the topic of statistical parsing for morphologically-rich languages. The SPMRL workshop was organized by Djamé Seddah, Sandra Kübler and Reut Tsarfaty, and featured 11 full papers and one short paper, an invited talk by Kevin Knight from the USC Information Sciences Institute, and a lively discussion panel featuring Dan Bikel, Slav Petrov, Julia Hockenmaier, Sandra Kubler and Owen Rambow as panelists. On the day preceding the workshop there were 53 registered participants, making it the second largest workshop at NAACL-HLT 2010.
The next conference in the IWPT series is scheduled to take place in 2011. Details regarding location and scheduling have not yet been determined. SIGPARSE is also scheduled to hold elections for SIG officers in 2011.
SIGPARSE maintains a website that contains information about the SIG, upcoming activities, and instructions for joining the membership and the mailing list. The website address is: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sigparse/