Special Interest Groups
John Nerbonne

SIGDAT, the special interest group for linguistic data and
corpus-based approaches to NLP, held a Joint Conference on Empirical
Methods in NLP and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP/VLC-2000) immediately
after ACL-2000 in Hong Kong (Oct.7-8).

SIGDIAL sponsored several meetings: 
  - AAAI Spring Symposium, My Dinner with R2D2: Natural Dialogues with
    Practical Robotic Devices (March 20-22, Stanford, California)
  - Workshop on Conversational Systems, NAACL/ANLP (May 4, Seattle,
    Washington, USA)
  - From spoken dialogue to full natural interactive dialogue: Theory,
    empirical analysis and evaluation.  (May 29, LREC 2000) (Athens, Greece)
  - Götalog 2000: 4th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of
    Dialogue (June 15-17, Göteborg University, Sweden)
  - Third Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation (July 3-5, Bellagio, Italy)
  - ACL 2000: 1st SigDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue with
    theme session on Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation
    (October 7-8, Hong Kong)
  - AAAI Fall Symposium, Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial
    Applications (November 3-5, North Falmouth, MA, USA)

SIGGEN sponsored "Impacts in Language Generation: NLG Between
Technology and Applications" 24-28 July, Schloss Dagstuhl, Saarland,
Germany; and "International Natural Language Generation Conference
13-16 June, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel.

SIGLEX was involved in the following events:
  - SIMPLE: From Monolingual to Multilingual Resources LREC2000,
    Athens, Greece, June 3, 2000.
  - The second Chinese Language Processing Workshop ACL-2000, Hong
    Kong, Oct. 7-8.
  - Word Senses and Multi-Linguality, ACL-2000, Hong Kong, Oct. 7-8.
  - Semantic Annotation and Intelligent Content, Coling00, Luxembourg,
    Aug 5/6.

SIGNLL organized CoNLL-2000, The Fourth Computational Natural Language
Learning Workshop, Sept. 14, Lisbon, Portugal (held in conjunction with 
ICGI-2000, the Fifth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, 
Sept. 11-13, Lisbon, and with a workshop on Learning Language in Logic.

SIGPARSE held IWPT 2000, the INternational Workshop on Parsing Technology,
on Feb. 23-25 in Trento, Italy. 

SIGPHON held SIGPHON 5 in conjunction with COLING 2000 in Luxemburg.

SIGSEM held the Second Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics 
Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany July 29-30.  There was active preparation for
IWCS-4, The Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics
held in Tilburg, Netherlands, January 10-12, 2001.


Martha Palmer and Richard Sproat discussed the formation of
a special interest group for Chinese Language Processing.
They will submit a proposal, including a constitution, in
2001.