SIGPARSE (Harry Bunt)
=====================

1999-2000 report from SIGPARSE
-----------------------------

Over the period July 1999 - July 2000, the activities of SIGPARSE 
have, as usual,  focussed on matters concerning the biennial 
`International Workshop on Parsing Technologies' (IWPT) series.
In addition, SIGPARSE has given its sponsorship to the workshop on 
Chinese Language Processing that takes place in conjunction with 
ACL-2000 in Hong Kong.

The Sixth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2000) 
took place at the Institute for Research in Science and Technology 
(IRST) in Trento, Italy. The organisation was in the hands of 
Harry Bunt as general chair, John Carroll as program chair and 
Alberto Lavelli as local arrangements 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 so the workshop may be considered quite successful.

Preparations have in the mean time started for the Seventh International 
Workshop on Parsing Technologies, to be held in China in late 2001 or in 
Spring 2002. Giorgio Satta has agreed to be program chair and Fuliang 
Weng to be local arrangements chair. 
 
Also, a book has been put together publishing an edited selection 
of papers, presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Parsing 
Technologies (IWPT'97) which was held in Cambridge, Mass., September 
17-21, 1997. 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. 
The new volume, entitled "Advances in Probabilistic and Other Parsing 
Technologies" and edited by Harry Bunt and Anton Nijholt, is again 
published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (series Text, Speech and 
Language Technology) and is forthcoming in October 2000. 

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'). 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/'.

Harry Bunt, September 2000.