Annual Report 2001

From SIGSEM

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                 Annual Report on SIGSEM, May 2001
                  Patrick Blackburn and Harry Bunt
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It has been an exciting year for SIGSEM. Last year's report contained
the following words:

   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.

This turned out to be a gross underestimate. The results of our
membership drive greatly exceeded our expectations: at the end of last
year (31 December 2000) our membership was 435, and our current
membership (24 May 2001) is 532.

This is an extremely pleasant development, and one that suggests that
there is untapped interest in computational semantics. Of course, our
task is now to ensure that this interest is not dissipated. We have
been attempting to do this in the following ways:

   (1) Newsletter. SIGSEM is now emailing a newsletter to its
membership every four months. The first two newsletters have already
been sent out. Copies of these can be found on the SIGSEM website,
www.sigsem.org (click on ARCHIVE).

   (2) Website. The center of SIGSEM is its webpage, and we have been
slowly developing it, adding links of interest to members, and so on.
Our long term goal is to make this site a key resource for anyone
interested in computational approaches to natural language semantics.

   (3) Business meeting. A SIGSEM business meeting was held during
IWCS-4 (the Fourth International Workshop in Computational Semantics)
in Tilburg, from 16.45 - 17.45, on 11 January 2001.  The meeting was
well attended and a number of interesting ideas were raised concerning
both general themes (such as possible future directions for SIGSEM)
and specific issues (such as possible changes to the website).  There
is a report on the SIGSEM business meeting on the SIGSEM webpage.

   (4) Endorsing courses. SIGSEM has endorsed four courses at
ESSLLI-XIII, which will be held on 13-24 August 2001 in Helsinki,
Finland. ESSLLI stands for "European Summer Schools in Logic Language
and Information".  At some stage, it is likely that SIGSEM will try to
host its own schools, focussed entirely on computational semantics. In
the meantime, ESSLLI endorsements seem a good way of raising the field
profile, and attracting young researchers.

Two SIGSEM endorsed computational semantics workshops were held (or
will be held) in 2001: IWCS-4 and ICoS-3.

The Fourth International Workshop in Computational Semantics (IWCS-4),
hosted by the Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence
Group at Tilburg University, was held in Tilburg, the Netherlands,
from 10-12 January 2001.  The IWCS is the leading workshop in
computational semantics.  The IWCS-4 program, consisting of 3 invited
talks (by James Allen, Jan van Eijck and Alex Lascarides), 22
submitted talks, and a number of shorter presentations, continued the
tradition in fine form and was much enjoyed by participants.  There is
a report on IWCS-4 on the SIGSEM webpage.

The Third Inference in Computational Semantics workshop (ICoS-3).
will be co-located with 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).  Co-locating ICoS-3 with IJCAR
should encourage further links between the automated reasoning and NLP
communities. The last SIGSEM newsletter asked for volunteers to write
a report on ICoS-3, and we hope this will be made available sometime
later this year.

Summing up: a good year for SIGSEM. But not a time to sit back and
relax.  While the numbers are impressive, it is clear that much
remains to be done to increase awareness among students and
researchers of what computational semantics is about, and to forge
links with neighboring disciplines. These are the tasks that SIGSEM
has set for itself in the coming years.

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