2008Q3 Reports: SIGSEM

                   Report on SIGSEM, May 2008
                  Johan Bos & Alexander Koller


The current SIGSEM membership counts 635 members.

SIGSEM is conformant with the ACL SIG guidelines, except that
elections are held every three years in accordance with our
constitution (approved by the ACL Executive).  We have notified Steven
Bird of this discrepancy.

Since the last ACL report, two newsletter have been sent to the SIGSEM
members, one in October 2007 and one in May 2008, reporting on
upcoming conferences, shared tasks, reports on past conferences, and
general SIGSEM information.

SIGSEM officers have also started to archive the proceedings of previous
SIGSEM conferences, to wit ICoS and IWCS, in the ACL anthology.

The next IWCS, the eighth International Workshop on Computational
Semantics, the major conference organised by SIGSEM, will be held on
Jan 7-9, 2009 in Tilburg, Netherlands.  

The events endorsed by SIGSEM in 2007/2008 were/are: 

[1] OntoLex07. From Text to Knowledge: The Lexicon/Ontology
    Interface. Workshop at ISWC07 (6th International Semantic Web
    Conference) November 11, 2007 (Busan, South-Korea)

[2] SRSL7: International Workshop on the Semantic Representation of
    Spoken Language. November 13, 2007 (Salamanca, Spain)

[3] 3rd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population, Workshop at 
    ECAI 2008 July 21st/22nd, 2008 in Patras, Greece

[4] STEP 2008: Semantics in Text Processing. September 22-24, 2008
    (Venice, Italy)

[5] Constraints in Discourse III. Potsdam, Germany. July 30-Aug 1, 2008.

In addition, SIGSEM has endorsed two new shared tasks in this period:

[1] STEP Shared Task: Comparing semantic representations
    http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/link14.htm

[2] GIVE Shared Task: Generating instructions in virtual environments
    http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/v1akolle/proj/give/