The main goal of *SEM is to provide a stable forum for the growing number of NLP researchers working on different aspects of semantic processing, which has been scattered over a large array of small workshops and conferences.

The first edition of *SEM will be a two-day conference collocated with the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Human Language Technologies 2012 conference (NAACL HLT), which will take place in Montreal, Canada.