Annual Report 1999

From SIGSEM

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                Annual Report on SIGSEM, June 1999
               Patrick Blackburn and Claire Gardent

This report was sent in for the 37th ACL meeting, University of
Maryland, June 20--26, 1999. It was written shortly after the ACL had
approved the creation of SIGSEM, but before elections for the various
officer had been held.
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The idea of establishing SIGSEM, an ACL special interest group in
computational semantics, was first proposed towards the end of 1998 by
the authors of this report.  Preliminary inquiries indicated that the
idea was of interest to many researchers (we received more than 100
responses, many highly enthusiastic).  The proposal was further
discussed at the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Semantics
(IWCS), which was held in Tilburg in January 1999.  At a well-attended
meeting, the consensus was that it was worthwhile trying to establish
such a SIG.

Accordingly, a draft constitution was prepared, circulated to
prospective members for comments, and (about two months later) changed
in the light of suggestion received and submitted to the ACL for
approval. Approval was recently granted, and we are currently
organising the first SIGSEM elections, and are about to start a
membership drive.

As regards the elections, Ewan Klein has recently agreed to act as an
"honest broker" for the first elections.  That is, he has agreed to
receive nominations, announce the candidates, and collect and count
votes. The exact timetable is still being discussed with him, but we
hope to have completed the entire election process by the end of
October 1999.

As regards the membership drive, during the ESSLLI summer school
(which will be held in Utrecht) a one day workshop on Inference in
Computational Semantics (ICoS) is being organised in Amsterdam. We
expect this will attract a number of summer school participants, and
will take the opportunity to further publicise SIGSEM. The longer term
prospects are also good. For example, Harry Bunt, the founder of the
IWCS (which until recently was the only event exclusively devoted to
computational semantics) has expressed his support for the new SIG and
volunteered assistance in a number of ways (such as organising a web
site). Thus SIGSEM should be able to establish a useful presence
relatively quickly.

While it is early days yet, we are confident that SIGSEM will provide
a useful forum for computational linguists interested in semantics.
Both in Europe and America there are clear signs that a new generation
of researchers interested in semantical issues is
emerging. Interesting new work is appearing and (in Europe) a number
of EU research proposals of direct relevance to SIGSEM have been
submitted to the European commission (under the new "Fifth Framework"
program).  We hope that SIGSEM will build on such developments to
become a genuinely international forum for computational semantics.

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