SIGSEM Report 2002

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Annual Report on SIGSEM, June 2002
Patrick Blackburn and Harry Bunt
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It has been a relatively quiet year for SIGSEM. Membership has
stabilised at 559, and after a heady start we're now faced with the
longterm task of trying to build a useful SIG.

One major event was held by SIGSEM over the last year. The Third
Inference in Computational Semantics workshop (ICoS-3) was co-located
with IJCAR in June 2001 in Siena, Italy. IJCAR, the International
Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, was a one-off event made up
of the three main automated reasoning conferences (CADE, FTP, and
TABLEAUX). By co-locating with with IJCAR in this way, it was hoped
to establish further links between the automated reasoning community
and the computational semantics community. A report on ICOS-3 can be
found on the SIGSEM homepage (www.sigsem.org). The ICoS-3 proceedings
are currently being edited: they are due to appear in a special issue
of the Journal of Language and Computation.

The next major SIGSEM-endorsed activity will be IWCS-5 (The 5th
International Workshop on Computational Semantics), scheduled for
January 15-17, 2003 in Tilburg.

Another SIGSEM-endorsed initiative was proposed by Harry Bunt and
Laurent Romary: A Working Group on Multimodal Meaning Representation.
The idea is to create a working group devoted to this topic operating
under the auspices of SIGSEM, using the SIGSEM web pages and
newsletter for communication about the activities of the WG, and using
SIGSEM-sponsored events like IWCS and ICoS as opportunities to meet
and to present the activities to the computational semantics
community. A preliminary meeting of the working group took place at
LREC 2002 in May in Las Palmas, Spain; the first full-scale meeting
will take place on January 14, 2003, in conjunction with IWCS-5.