In the 1980s our focus was in trying to find an alternative to the word "semantics", which in practice was becoming "look it up in the dictionary" or "follow a link in a semantic net".
we moved away from the name "Machine Learning of Natural Language" which was the title of the book based on my own PhD thesis (Powers and Turk, 1989) while the AAAI event I organized added "and Ontology" (Powers, 1991a).