Tilburg University will host the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics on 7-9 January 2009. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in any aspect of the computation, annotation, extraction, and representation of meaning in natural language, in multimedia objects, or in multimodal messages.
Topics

Areas of special interest for IWCS-8 will be computational aspects of semantic theories; theoretical aspects of the design and implementation of language understanding systems and systems for multimodal communication; and semantic annotation of natural language and multimodal utterances. Papers are invited that are concerned with topics in these and related areas, including but not limited to the following:

* construction of representations of meaning in natural language
* methodologies and practices for semantic annotation
* modelling and using context in semantic interpretation
* machine learning of semantic structures
* informal and formal semantic methods and their combination
* the semantics of semantic annotation
* computing meaning in multimodal interaction
* construction and use of underspecified representations of meaning
* semantic concepts and ontologies

Special Event: Joint SIGSEM/ISO meeting

Immediately preceding IWCS-8, on 5-6 January 2009, a joint meeting will be held of the ISO TC 37/SC 4 Thematic Domain Group on Semantic Content, and the ACL SIGSEM Working Group on the Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information. In this meeting, members of the ISO Thematic Domain Group will present and discuss ongoing efforts aimed at defining interoperable concepts for semantic representation and annotation.

This meeting will be open to (a restricted number of) IWCS-8 participants. For more information see the ISO Thematic Domain Group website and the SIGSEM Working Group website.
Program committee
to be announced
Organizing committee

Harry Bunt (chair)
Johan Bos
Jeroen Geertzen
Reinhard Muskens
Olga Petukhova
Elias Thijsse
Stephen Pulman
Lauraine Sinay
Submission requirements

Three types of submission are solicited: full papers, short papers, and project abstracts.

Full papers are original papers of maximally 12 pages, that will be published in the workshop proceedings and will have a full oral presentation of about 30 minutes at the workshop.

Short papers are mini-papers of maximally 4 pages, that will be published in the workshop proceedings and have a very brief ('flash') oral presentation at the workshop. Authors of short papers are invited to also put up a poster and participate in a poster session.

Project abstracts are brief descriptions of 2 pages of ongoing, recently completed, or starting projects. They will be published in the workshop proceedings and will be presented in a poster session.

Submission must be done through the online submission system. All submissions should be marked as being a full paper, a short paper, or a project abstract, by adding to the paper title the postfix (FP), (SP) or (PA) when entering the title in the online submission system.
Proceedings

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings, which will be available at the time of the conference. We also aim at publishing a selection of the accepted papers in book form.

A selection of papers from IWCS-2 has been published as Computing Meaning, Vol. 1, Harry Bunt and Reinhard Muskens, editors (Kluwer, Dordrecht 1999), while papers from IWCS-3 have been published as Computing Meaning, Vol. 2, Harry Bunt, Reinhard Muskens and Elias Thijsse, editors (Kluwer, Dordrecht 2001). The book Computing Meaning, Volume 3 (Harry Bunt and Reinhard Muskens, editors), with revised selected papers from IWCS-4 and IWCS-5, was published in 2007 by Springer, Dordrecht.
Important dates
1 Oct 2008 Submission of full papers
27 Oct 2008 Notification of acceptance (full papers)
1 Nov 2008 Submission of short papers and project abstracts
10 Nov 2008 Notification of acceptance (short papers and project abstracts)
17 Nov 2008 Final versions of papers and abstracts due
1 Dec 2008 Deadline for early registration
5-6 Jan 2009 Meeting of ISO TC 37/SC 4 Thematic Domain Group and ACL-SIGSEM Working Group
7-9 Jan 2009 IWCS-8 Conference
Venue
IWCS-8 will be held in Building D ('Dante Building') of Tilburg University (room DZ 2). See the Campus Map.

Contact information

Lauraine Sinay
Department of Language and Information Science, Tilburg University
PO Box 90153
5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
Fax: +31-13-466 2892
Phone: +31-13-466 3060 or ..8118 or ..2668
Email: computational.semantics@uvt.nl


IWCS is endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics and by SIGLEX, the ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon.