2011Q3 Reports: SIGPARSE

SIGPARSE 2011 Annual Report

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.

Following significant interest in a 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.

In recent months, our main focus has been on preparations for the the next conference in the IWPT series. IWPT 2011, the 12th International Conference on Parsing Technologies, will be held in Dublin, Ireland, on October 5-7, 2011. The conference is hosted by Dublin City University, which is responsible for local and financial arrangements. Harry Bunt continues his long-standing role as general chair for the conference. Program chair is Joakim Nivre, and local arrangements chair is Ozlem Cetinoglu. Building on the success of the first workshop last year, the 2nd Workshop on Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL 2011) will take place on October 6, as an integral part of IWPT 2011.

SIGPARSE is also scheduled to hold elections for SIG officers in 2011. Preparations are being coordinated by SIGPARSE Secretary John Carroll. The plan is to hold the election in late summer and to announce the new slate of officers at IWPT 2011 in Dublin in October.

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/