SIGMEDIA (Multimedia Language Processing)
Elisabeth Andre

MAILING ADDRESS: sigmedia@dfki.de
URL: http://www.sigmedia.org

SPONSORED WORKSHOPS:
Together with MITRE, SIGMedia has been serving as a co-sponsor of the ACL
Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processing which will take
place in Toulouse on July 7th 2001. The organizers of the workshop are: Lisa
Harper, MITRE, USA, Inderjeet Mani, MITRE and Georgetown University, USA and
Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA.

SIGMedia is also involved in a joint activity with the ACL Special Interest
Group SIGDial. Both of them support the International Speech Communication
Association with the preparation of a the ISCA Tutorial and Research
Workshop on Spoken Dialogue in Mobile Environments. The workshop will take
place at Kloster Irsee, Germany from June 17-21, 2002. The organizers of the
workshop are: Paul Heisterkamp and Wolfgang Minker, both DaimlerChrysler AG,
Germany, Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark and Elisabeth Andre,
University of Augsburg, Germany. The URL of the workshop is:
http://www.sigmedia.org/ids02/

WEBSITE:
SIGMedia got its own domain which is: http://www.sigmedia.org. As in the
previous years, there is a cooperation with the Electronic Transactions of
Artificial Intelligence – Area User Interfaces which maintains a website
with relevant conferences together with SIGMedia. Peter Rist from DFKI
volunteered to create a new logo and a new layout for the SIGMedia webpages.

MAILING LIST:
Since SIGMEDIA got a variety of undesired emails in the past, it was decided
to maintain a moderated list. The moderator is Elisabeth Andre. For the
future, we consider to send out a regular newsletter in cooperation with
ETAI due a high overlap in people on the SIGMedia and the ETAI-lists.

MEMBERSHIP:
Even though the SIGMedia membership is generally increasing, we also feel
that the area of multimedia language processing has to be promoted to a
stronger extent within the ACL community. While there is high interest in
specialized workshops that address NLP in a multimedia context, the number
of multimedia papers at general NLP conferences, such as ACL or COLING is
rather low.