Report on SIGSEM, June 2004
Patrick Blackburn and Harry Bunt


The period since the last SIGSEM report was written (January 2004) has
been relatively quiet.  Over the last five months SIGSEM has not
organised any of its own events, but it has supported a meeting of its
Working Group on the Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information
and it has endorsed a number of other events . In particular,
computational semantics will be heavily represented at ESSLLI 2004
which takes place in Nancy, France, from 9-20 August 2004 (see
http://esslli2004.loria.fr/) and SIGSEM has endorsed 4 courses at this
summer school, namely:

 Computational semantics (Introductory Course)
 Alexander Koller, Aljoscha Burchardt and Stephan Walter

 Reasoning with natural language (Introductory Course)
 Ian Pratt-Hartmann (University of Manchester)

 Recent developments in computational semantics (Advanced course)
 Markus Egg  and Valia Kordoni

 Modelling information structure for computational discourse processing
 Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova

Pre-registration figures indicate that all four courses will be well
attended (indeed the course by Koller et al looks set to be the most
popular course of the summer school).

A special issue of the Journal of Logic, Language and Information,
edited by Michael Kohlhase, devoted to inference in computational
semantics has appeared (Journal of Logic Language and Information,
Volume 13, No. 3, Spring 2004). This contains a selection of papers
which were originally presented at ICoS-3, the Third International
Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics (a SIGSEM event).
All papers were revised and re-refereed for the special issue.

The ACL SIGSEM Working Group on the Representation of Multimodal
Semantic Information held its third meeting in conjunction with LREC
2004 in Lisbon in the form of a joint meeting with the ISO
(International Standards Organization) Technical Committee on
Terminology and Language Resources. This meeting has resulted in the
identification of a number of aspects of semantic annotation and
representation for which small task groups have been formed that will
report at the WG's next meeting.

The next major activity in which SIGSEM will be involved will be
IWCS-6, the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics,
12 - 14 January 2005 in Tilburg, the Netherlands.  For more
information see the IWCS-6 website
http://let.uvt.nl/research/TI/sigsem/iwcs/iwcs6

Immediately preceding IWCS-6, on 10-11 January 2005, the WG on the
Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information will have its fourth
meeting at Tilburg University. This meeting will be open to IWCS-6
participants. For more information see the Working Group's website at
http://let.uvt.nl/research/TI/sigsem/wg