Background
The SIGSEM Working Group on the Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information has its roots in the workshop `Fusion and Coordination in Multimodal Communication' organized by Wolfgang Wahlster, Harry Bunt and Mark Mybury in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in October/November 2001. At that workshop, it was concluded by a group of researchers in multimodal communication that it would be worthwhile to follow up the discussions during the workshop on requirements and recommendations for the representation of meaning in multimodal interaction.
This idea was also taken up by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) at the preliminary meeting of its Technical Committee 37, Subcommittee 4 on Terminology and Standards for Linguistic Resources Management in Jeju (Korea) in February 2002. It was agreed that recommendations for the representation of multimodal semantic information would be the topic of a working group outside the ISO organisation, with the hope that it would eventually become a topic for standardization in ISO. This was formally approved by an ISO meeting during LREC 2002 at Las Palmas.
The topic of how to represent multimodal semantic information would seem to naturally belong to the area of interest covered by the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM); therefore a SIGSEM Working Group in this area was set up during 2002. A number of members of this WG met at a preliminary WG meeting during LREC 2002 and agreed to plan the first official meeting of the WG in conjunction with IWCS-5 in J anuary 2003 in Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Background documents:
Outcome of Dagstuhl Workshop `Fusion and Coordination in Multimodal Communication'.
LREC 2002 discussion paper by Harry Bunt and Laurent Romary.
LREC 2004 discussion paper by Harry Bunt and Laurent Romary.