Annual Report 2000

From SIGSEM

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                 Annual Report on SIGSEM, October 2000
                    Patrick Blackburn and Harry Bunt
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The past year has been dominated by two activities. First, sponsoring
workshops. Second, getting the SIGSEM website up and running, and
holding a membership drive.

ICoS-2, the Second Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics
was held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, on July 29--30, 2000.  The
invited speakers were:

    James Allen: Towards Practical Dialogue Systems.
    
    Christof Monz: Computational Semantics in Information
                   Retrieval

    Bonnie Webber: Computing Anaphora

There were thirteen invited talks, and six system demonstrations.  In
addition, there was a fruitful discussion of the role of SIGSEM and
the future of the ICoS workshop. ICoS is a small event, but a lively
one that attracts some bright young researchers. There was a general
feeling that it was important to retain the genuine workshop
atmosphere it has, and to increase the emphasis on implementations.
The proceedings of ICoS-2 will be appearing as a special issue of the
Journal of Language and Computation.

Plans are now underway for ICoS-3. If all goes according to plan, this
will be held as a satellite workshop of IJCAR in June 2001 in Siena,
Italy.  IJCAR, the International Joint Conference on Automated
Reasoning, is a one-off event made up of the three main automated
reasoning conferences (CADE, FTP, and TABLEAUX).  Holding ICoS-3 as a
satellite workshop should encourage further links between the
automated reasoning and NLP communities.  As well as invited and
contributed talks, we are planning to offer a tutorial on automated
reasoning for computational linguists, and a tutorial on computational
semantics for members of the automated reasoning community.

SIGSEM is also a sponsor of IWCS-4, the Fourth International Workshop
on Computational Semantics, which will be held in Tilburg, the
Netherlands, from January 10--12, 2001.

A preliminary version of the SIGSEM webpage has been made public (and
there is now a link to it from the ACL homepage): see

   www.sigsem.org

It is now possible to sign up as a SIGSEM member online, and the list
of members is maintained publicly.

Response to the site has exceeded expectations.  It was anticipated
that membership would plateau at about 90. In fact, in the first two
weeks since the site was made public we have signed up 110 members.
We will be continuing our membership drive in the coming weeks.  It
now seems plausible that we will attract over 150 members by the end
of the year.  As encouraging as the numbers is the quality of the
membership we are attracting.

Once the membership drive is over, it is hoped to further develop the
website. Among other things, we hope to develop serious coverage of
projects in computational semantics, educational tools and courses in
computational semantics, and inference tools.

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