2013Q3 Reports: SIGSEM

The SIGSEM board

The current board is composed of:

• Johan Bos (President);
• Katrin Erk (Secretary);
• Luciana Benotti (Information Officer);
• Paul Buitelaar (Information Officer);
• Alexander Koller (Information Officer);
• Christian Pietsch (Information Officer).

Some of contact addresses might have changed -- please look here for the latest updates.

The next elections were planned for March 2013, but haven't been held yet. We will plan to have the elections after the summer break.

Members

The current SIGSEM membership counts 841 members. We have started cleaning up the database with members, by removing registered members whose email addresses aren't valid anymore after a couple of email bounces, of people who we can't reach otherwise. There is a reasonably active, moderated mailinglist, see SIGSEM.

Major SIGSEM Events: IWCS and *SEM

The major SIGSEM event of 2013 was IWCS-2013, which took place in Potsdam, Germany. This was a four-day conference (including five workshops and an open-space afternoon) attracting over a 100 computational semanticists. IWCS-2013 received 60 long submissions and 22 short submissions (plus 3 long submissions that were accepted as short). Accepted were 25 long and 16 short papers, resulting in an acceptance rate of 41.7% for long papers and 64% for short papers. Two SIGSEM board members (Alexander Koller and Katrin Erk) took care of the organisation. There are three bids to organize IWCS-2015.

Last year (2012), SIGSEM and SIGLEX co-organised the start of new conference, *SEM, which took place in Montreal at NAACL. We see this as a very positive move towards collaboration of the SIGLEX and SIGSEM communities, which have a large overlap in research interests, but historically originated from different angles. See 2012Q3_Reports:_SIGLEX for a more detailed report on *SEM. The second edition of *SEM is collocated with NAACL in Atlanta this year. Plans for *SEM-2014 are currently discussed between the SIGLEX and SIGSEM boards.

Endorsed events in 2011

• IWCS-2011
  Oxford, UK, 12-14 January 2011
• ISA-6: Sixth Joint ACL – ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (in conjuction with IWCS-2011)
• TextInfer-2011
  Workshop on Textual Entailment (in conjunction with EMNLP)
• GEMS-2011
  Geometrical Models of Natural Language Semantics (in conjunction with EMNLP)
• CID 2011
  Constraints in Discourse IV, Agay-Roches Rouges, Var, France, 14-17 September 2011