Computational Semantics is to the semantics of natural language what computational linguistics is to linguistics proper. Natural language semantics studies linguistic meaning, is interested in generating the truth-conditions of linguistic expressions, studies the relation of logical inference in ordinary language, describes the behavior of presuppositions etc. Computational semantics does all these things too, but is particularly focused on algorithmic realizations of the relevant notions. Computational semanticists typically are interested in defining data structures that can deal with the massive ambiguity of natural language. They are also interested in computing truth-conditions, computing entailment relations, computing presuppositions, etc. It is clear that this requires intensive interaction, not only with other subdisciplines of computational linguistics, but also with other areas, such as knowledge representation, context modelling, automated inference and model generation. The last two disciplines study two facets of mechanized reasoning in their full generality; computational semantics is particularly interested in the case of reasoning in natural language. Knowledge representation and context modelling study the knowledge that human reasoning processes must have access to and in which natural language meaning can be grounded.

IWCS is endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics.