2009Q3 Reports: SIGSEM

Report on SIGSEM by Johan Bos and Alexander Koller (July 2009)

The current SIGSEM membership counts 661 members.

The SIGSEM constitution calls for board elections every three years. We plan to hold the next elections in early 2010, in compliance with the constitution.

Since the last ACL report, one newsletter has been sent to the SIGSEM members, in November 2008, featuring a report of the STEP 2008 workshop in Venice, a report of the OLP-3 workshop at ECAI, a report of the CID 2008 workshop in Potsdam, a statement of the ACM Transaction on Computational Logic journal, and an announcement of the IWCS-8 conference on computational semantics in Tilburg.

The next SIGSEM newsletter (planned for this month) is under preparation. We are currently discussing to replace the newsletter with a SIGSEM blog, which could be updated more frequently.

SIGSEM officers have continued work on archiving the proceedings of previous ICoS conferences in the ACL Anthology. This will bring all major SIGSEM-sponsored workshops into the Anthology, and is expected to be completed within 2009.

IWCS-8, the Eighth International Workshop on Computational Semantics, the major conference organised by SIGSEM, was held on Jan 7-9, 2009 in Tilburg, Netherlands. An extensive conference report by Caroline Sporleder and Luciana Benotti is available from the SIGSEM webpage.

The events endorsed by SIGSEM in 2008/2009 were/are:

• GEMS 2009 GEometrical Models of Natural Language Semantics (March 31, 2009 -- Athens, Greece)

• SEW 2009 Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (Boulder, CO -- 4-5 June 2009)

• DiaHolmia 2009 (Stockholm, Sweden -- 24-26 June 2009)

• GL2009 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon (Pisa, Italy -- 17-19 Sept 2009)

• Shared Task Second NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments