2011Q3 Reports: SIGSEM

Report on SIGSEM by Johan Bos (June 2011)

The current SIGSEM membership counts 701 members. The database needs to be cleaned up as there is a relatively large number of registered members whose email addresses aren't valid anymore. This is planned for the coming term.

The SIGSEM constitution calls for board elections every three years. Elections were held early 2010, in compliance with the constitution. Here is a brief summary of the elections results: Johan Bos (President); Katrin Erk (Secretary); Luciana Benotti (Information Officer); Paul Buitelaar (Information Officer); Alexander Koller; (Information Officer); Christian Pietsch (Information Officer). For current contact addresses please look here.

Since the last ACL report, one newsletter has been sent to the SIGSEM members, in October 2009, featuring a report on the GEMS workshop, the GIVE-2 shared task, an announcement of new association for research on ontologies (IAOA), the shared task on VP Ellipsis, an announcement of a new journal (Dialogue & Discourse), and the ISA-5 workshop on semantic annotation.

SIGSEM officers have continued work on archiving the proceedings of previous IWCS and ICoS conferences in the ACL Anthology. This will bring all major SIGSEM-sponsored workshops into the Anthology. At this point, the Anthology holds the ICoS-5 and IWCS-8 proceedings.

The next International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS-2011), the main SIGSEM event, will be held in Oxford, UK, on 12-14 January 2011. The first call for papers has been distributed in the second week of May. The web site is up and running. Deadline for paper submissions is 30 September 2010.

The events endorsed by SIGSEM in 2009 were:

• GL2009
  Pisa, Italy, 17-19 Sept 2009
• IWCS-8 8th International Workshop on Computational Semantics
  Jan 7-9, 2009 (Tilburg, Netherlands)
• GEMS 2009
  March 31, 2009 (Athens, Greece)
• SEW 2009
  Boulder, CO, 4-5 June 2009
• DiaHolmia 2009
  Stockholm, Sweden, 24-26 June 2009