Business Meeting at Tilburg

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1st SIGSEM Business Meeting

Notes on the 1st SIGSEM Business Meeting, January 11, 2001
Tilburg, during IWCS-4

Contents:

1. SIGSEM: Where it came from and what could it do?
2. General discussion and ideas

SIGSEM: Where it came from and what could it do? (Patrick Blackburn)

A little history

The idea of establishing SIGSEM was discussed at IWCS-3 (January 1999). The initiative was agreed on, and a constitution was proposed. More discussion took place at ICoS-1 (August 1999). SIGSEM was approved by ACL in fall 1999. Officer elections were organized (thanks to Ewan Klein for the effort).

In summer 2000, we got the SIGSEM website running. ICoS-2 took place in August 2000. The website went public in September 2000, and we started a membership drive. First, low-key publicity targeted colleagues and well-known researchers in the field: this generated about 130 members. Then mass announcements were distributed, which by the end of the year 2000 boosted membership to about 430.

Now we've got it what are we gonna do with it?

  • The overall goals are to support and to coordinate the computational semantics community, to create focus in it, and to give it a sense of direction.
  • To do this, ideas and feedback at all levels are needed! Here are some proposals:
    • Website:
    • Goals: facilitate and coordinate the development of computational semantics as a field.
    • Current state: mainly registering membership. More content is needed.
    • Plan: increase content, make the website a useful means of communication. For example:
      • compile a guide of current projects in computational semantics world wide (volunteer: Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová)
      • compile a list of inference tools and other material (volunteer: Johan Bos)
      • compile a guide to education in computational semantics (volunteer: Patrick Blackburn)
      • compile a guide to statistical, corpus-based methods in computational semantics, information extraction, etc.
      Feedback from all members is most welcome in any area!
    Newsletter
    • Goal: act as a general reminder that there's computational semantics happening out there, plus specific info on what's new on the website.
    • Current state: Issue No.1/2001 distributed to all members on January 3.
    • Plan: send out periodically in 4-monthly intervals.
    Education in computational semantics

    General discussion and ideas

    There was no disagreement with the proposals made above. The following comments and/or additional suggestions were made:

    Events

    • There seems no need now for another regular event besides IWCS and ICoS, so we do not want to establish a regular specialized SIGSEM workshop at ACL for the time being.
    • A future ICoS, or perhaps a joint IWCS+ICoS, could be attached to an ACL.
    • It would be good to exploit SIG overlap at ACL, e.g. to have joint workshop.
    • The SIGSEM website's info about regular events in general should be extended to also include the Amsterdam colloquium (e.g., the 12th installment: AC99) and the Workshop on Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (e.g.,  the 5th installment: Bi-Dialogue 2001)

    Membership database

    • Extending the membership database it to include more (optional) info about members would be useful.
    • It would be useful to be able to search the member database also by interests.

    Education

    • Downloadable course materials (transparencies etc.) would be useful. Send links to teaching material either to .

    Bibliographical Database

  • Searchable BibTeX database would be useful. Possible input: Rich Thomason (mentioned by Jan van Eijck), FraCaS project (Massimo Poesio), Christof Monz on DRT. Including keywords and keyword-search would be useful.
  • An Amazon-like interface enabling to input comments on books and papers might be useful.

    • Discussion Forum

    • Do we want a SIGSEM discussion list? There is already the LINGUIST list It is not clear at the moment that another, specialized forum would be needed.

    Overcoming European bias

    • Current membership statistics should be analyzed!
    • It would be nice to extend SIGSEM's scope and improve the contacts outside Europe. 
      Ideas, suggestions, contacts, pointers, etc. are welcome (and should be sent to
    • Maybe a future ICoS  in the USA should be attempted. Getting a SIGSEM-related event at ACL would probably help.

    Overcoming logical bias

    • Does the SIGSEM community want to embrace only approaches based on logic? No!

      • Although papers at IWCS almost exclusively logical, non-logical approaches would have been welcome. Interaction with research using non-logical methods, such as, for example, experimental methods, statistical approaches, etc. needs to be actively fostered. SIGSEM wants to help to bring these different communities together! Perhaps a future event should invite such speaker(s). Again, appearance at ACL should help to attract otherwise unlikely audience/submissions. Further suggestions welcome (again, write to ).
    Notes taken by Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová

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