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                   Report on SIGSEM, July 2006
                       Patrick Blackburn
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The major event organised by SIGSEM in 2006 was ICoS-5, the 
fifth workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics, which 
was held from 20 - 21 April 2006 in Buxton, England.  IC0S-5 was 
widely regarded by participants as the most successful and 
interesting ICoS to date, with a number of interesting new 
developments and directions becoming evident. The invited 
speakers were:

   Christian Ebert (University of Bielefeld): Expressive 
   Power and Complexity
   of Underspecified Representations

   Patrick Pantel (ISI, University of Southern California): Knowledge
   Harvesting and Fusion from Small and Large Corpora

   Stephen Pulman (Oxford University): Bridging the gap between 
   formal and computational semantics


In addition, 12 research papers and 6 short papers/posters 
were presented. The Richard Montague Memorial award (the 
traditional ICoS award for best presentation) was awarded to

     Patrick Pantel

for his invited talk.

The events endorsed by SIGSEM in 2006 were:

   Robotics: Science & Systems 2006 Workshop on 
   Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction For Getting 
   The Job Done.  
   Philadelphia PA, August 18 2006

   KONVENS06: workshop on on the Interface between 
   Lexical and Discourse
   Semantics.  Konstanz, Germany, October 7, 2006

   DELFI 2006: workshop on Natural Language Processing 
   in Augmented and Ambient
   Learning. Darmstadt, Germany, September, 11th 2006

As far upcoming activities, the next large workshop in which SIGSEM 
will be involved is the Seventh International Workshop on Computational 
Semantics (IWCS-7) which will be held at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 
from 10-12 January 2007. This event is held every two years (at Tilburg) 
and is the main workshop solely devoted to computational semantics.

And, last but not least, SIGSEM elections will be held later this year.
Patrick Blackburn, the SIGSEM president, has already made it known he 
will not be standing for re-election. The election process should be 
finished by the end of the year, or early in 2007, and it is hoped 
that IWCS-7 will provide a forum in which the new SIGSEM team can 
meet to discuss their plans.