Corpora: FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS : ACL Workshop on Discourse

Nancy M. Ide (ide@cs.vassar.edu)
Wed, 24 Mar 1999 11:25:55 -0500 (EST)

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FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE MARCH 30, 1999
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ACL'99 WORKSHOP

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DISCOURSE/DIALOGUE STRUCTURE AND REFERENCE
June 21 1999
University of Maryland

Sponsored by SIGDIAL
ACL Special Interest Group (SIG) on Discourse and Dialogue

-o-

The relationship between the structure of discourse and dialogue and
the use of referring expressions has been the focus of much research
in linguistics, computational linguistics, and
psycholinguistics. Although individual efforts have been couched in a
variety of frameworks ranging from (S)DRT and RST to Centering, they
all share two underlying assumptions:

1. The structure of discourse affects the interpretation of
referring expressions and the space of anaphoric accessibility.

2. The use of referring expressions restricts the set of possible
discourse interpretations.

However, most approaches address only one of these two views on the
relation between structure and reference. And although several
theories explaining this relationship exist, few have made a
significant impact on practical applications such as discourse
parsing, summarization, generation, and name-entity recognition.

This workshop will provide a forum for researchers in all areas of
linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics who are
interested in advancing the state of the art in understanding the
relationship between discourse/dialogue structure and
reference. Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the
following topics and issues:

1. Linguistic issues:

o what is the relation between lexical-grammatical constructs,
referring expressions, and the structure of discourse/dialogue?

2. Psycholinguistic issues:

o how does the use of referents affect the human interpretation of
discourse/dialogue?

3. Corpus-specific issues:

o what coding schemata and annotation tools should one use in
order to encode the relation between discourse/dialogue
structure and reference?

4. Representation issues:

o how should discourse/dialogue structures and referents be
represented?

o how should one represent the relationship between them: as
preferences or as constraints?

5. Algorithmic issues:

o how can discourse/dialogue structures, referents, and co-
referential links be identified and computed?

o knowledge-intensive vs. shallow approaches

o rule-driven vs. statistical vs. corpus-based approaches

o Wordnet-based approaches

o how do discourse/dialogue structure and referential expressions
interact in natural language generation?

6. General issues:

o what are the commonalities of current approaches to studying the
relation between discourse/dialogue and referents?

o what are the differences?

o what are the arguments against a relation between
discourse/dialogue structure and reference?

o how language-dependent is the relation between discourse/dialogue
structure and reference?

Post-Workshop Dissemination:

Selected papers from the workshop will be compiled into a volume
tentatively scheduled to appear in the Text, Speech, and Language
Technology book series from Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Submission Procedure:

Authors are requested to submit one electronic version of their papers
OR four hardcopies. Please submit hardcopies only if electronic
submission is impossible. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures
and references. Please conform to the traditional two-column ACL
Proceedings format.

Style files can be downloaded from

http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/stylefiles/
ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/Proceedings/


Submissions should be sent to:

Nancy Ide
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
124 Raymond Avenue
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520 USA
Fax: (+1 914) 437 7498
WWW: http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide
E-mail: ide@cs.vassar.edu

Timetable:

Deadline for submissions: March 30, 1999.
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 1999.
Camera ready copies due: May 20,1999.

Organizing committee:

Dan Cristea
Department of Computer Science
University "A.I. Cuza" (Romania)

Nancy Ide
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College

Daniel Marcu
Information Sciences Institute/
University of Southern California

Program Committee:

Nicholas Asher, University of Texas
Eugene Charniak, Brown University
Udo Hahn, Freiburg University
Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corp.
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
Massimo Poesio, University of Edinburgh
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen
Michael Strube, University of Pennsylvania
Wietske Vonk, Max Planck Institute
Marilyn Walker, AT&T