[Corpora-List] 2nd CFP for ACL-2004 Workshop: Discourse Annotation

From: Donna Byron (dbyron@cis.ohio-state.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 07 2004 - 02:14:09 MET

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    Second Call for Papers
    Discourse Annotation
    A Workshop in conjunction with ACL'04 in Barcelona, Spain

    ----------------------------
    Workshop date: July 25-26, 2004
    Full paper submissions due: March 22, 2004
    Workshop website: http://www.cllt.osu.edu/dbyron/acl04
    ----------------------------

    WORKSHOP OVERVIEW:

    Advances in language technology draw on a combination of annotated
    empirical data and linguistic theory. The richer the annotation, the
    more that can potentially be learned and applied to unseen data.
    Thus the Penn TreeBank (PTB), with its part-of-speech (POS) tags
    and syntactic annotation, has been more useful than corpora annotated
    for POS-tags alone, and PropBank, in which PTB is annotated with
    predicate-argument relations, will be useful for more applications
    than the PTB alone.

    Two gross features of PTB and PropBank are that they annotate
    sentence/clause-level features and that they were undertaken
    with communal agreement (albeit somewhat contentious at first).
    Similar, largely communal projects have been undertaken for
    dialogue annotation, including MATE (now NITE).

    Discourse annotation (in contrast with sentence-level annotation) has
    taken a somewhat different course. While an early communal effort
    (DRI) to annotate discourse structure according to a consensus
    framework failed to achieve its goal, recognition remained of the
    value of discourse annotated corpora. The result has been that diverse
    grass-roots efforts have been producing individual corpora annotated
    for a wide variety of phenomena such as

       - referring/attributive expressions and coreference;
       - spatial/temporal expressions and spatial/temporal relations;
       - other anaphoric and/or elliptic expressions and their discourse
         dependencies;
       - discourse units and their relations to one another;
       - information structure themes and the themes/rhemes that license
         them;
       - discourse connectives and what they connect;
       - contexts of interpretation;
       - cognitive accessibility scales (e.g. animacy);
       - types of speech (direct, indirect, free indirect).

    Groups involved in these efforts appear to be using (or
    planning to use) these corpora for a range of applications that
    include: empirical testing of theoretical claims/hypotheses;
    supporting second-language acquisition of discourse-sensitive
    linguistic devices; training resolution procedures for co-referring
    expressions or other anaphors, that can be used in annotating
    additional texts or in supporting technologies such as information
    extraction, question answering, summarization, and/or text generation;
    training discourse parsers that can be used for annotating additional
    texts or for reducing the amount of manual effort needed in the
    process; and probabilistic sentence and text realization.

    The workshop is neutral as to whether consensus annotation is possible
    for every type of discourse phenomenon. Its aims are rather to:

       - bring a fuller range of discourse annotation activity to the
         attention of researchers working on discourse phenomena and their
         usefulness for language technologies;

       - highlight tools used in the annotation process or used to display
         or further analyse the results of annotation;

       - discuss obstacles to some (all?) forms of discourse-level
         annotation, such as the greater subjectivity that seems involved
         in making judgments related to, for example, bracketting and
         labelling;

       - identify gaps in this work (e.g., in the range of genre being
         annotated);

       - stimulate researchers with respect to the uses other researchers
         are putting their data to;

       - discuss (in small groups and in feedback sessions) whether we
         already have, or could together create, a significantly large,
         reusable corpus (or set of corpora) annotated for multiple
         discourse and sentence-level phenomena, as a much richer basis
         for both assessing theories and building better tools.

    With these aims in mind, we solicit papers on:

       - discourse annotation projects (in any language);
       - uses made of discourse annotated corpora, alone or together
         with other forms of annotation;
       - tools for discourse annotation (e.g., for assisting manual
         annotation or for (semi-)automating the process) or for analysing
         discourse annotated data;
       - tools for integrating layers of annotation (different types of
         word-, sentence-, and discourse-level markup);
       - requirements for annotated corpora from the perspective of
         computational linguistics (e.g., vis-a-vis data sharing,
         comparison, integration/alignment, etc.)
       - experiments with integrating and exploiting different layers of
         annotation (from word to discourse level)

    As well as for presentation, the papers will be used for structuring
    the above-mentioned small group discussions and feedback sessions.

    ----------------------------

    Format for Submissions

    Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions
    must use the 2-column ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style (see
    submission style files at http://www.acl2004.org/aclstyles/style.html).
    Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (up to 8 pages in
    length, including references, with a minimum font size of 10
    point). Papers outside the specified length are subject to be rejected
    without review. The paper should be written in English.

    ----------------------------

    Submission Questions

    Please send submission questions to the co-chairs:

         bonnie@inf.ed.ac.uk
         dbyron@cis.ohio-state.edu

    ----------------------------

    Submission Procedure

    Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or
    MS Word form of your submission to: Donna Byron
    (dbyron@cis.ohio-state.edu). The Subject line should be "ACL2004
    WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION".

    N.B. If you use any special fonts, please include them with your PDF
    submission. Otherwise reviewers may have unnecessary problems with
    printing.

    ----------------------------

    Deadlines:

    Paper submission deadline: Mar 22, 2004
    Notification of acceptance for papers: April 30, 2004
    Camera ready papers due: May 24, 2004
    Workshop date: Jul 25, 2004

    ----------------------------

    PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

    Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh (co-chair)
    Donna Byron, Ohio State University (co-chair)

    Steven Bird, Melbourne University
    Liesbeth Degand, University of Louvain
    Eva Hajicova, Charles University
    Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania
    Andrew Kehler, UC San Diego
    Daniel Marcu, ISI
    Katja Markert, Leeds University
    Malvina Nissim, Edinburgh University
    Livia Polanyi, FXPAL
    Frank Schilder, University of Hamburg
    Andrea Setzer, Sheffield University
    Wilbert Spooren, Free University of Amsterdam
    Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam
    Michael Strube, EML Research, Heidelberg
    Martin van den Berg, FXPAL
    Annie Zaenen, PARC

    ----------------------------

    CONTACT INFORMATION:

    Professor Bonnie Webber
    School of Informatics
    University of Edinburgh
    2 Buccleuch Place
    Edinburgh EH8 9LW
    UK
    email: bonnie@inf.ed.ac.uk
    phone: +44 131 650 4190
    fax: +44 131 650 4587

    Professor Donna Byron
    Department of Computer and Information Science
    The Ohio State University
    395 Dreese Laboratory
    2015 Neil Avenue
    Columbus, Ohio 43210
    USA
    email: dbyron@cis.ohio-state.edu
    phone: 614-292-6370
    fax: 614-292-2911

    -- 
    Dr. Donna K. Byron
    Assistant Professor
    OSU Computer and Information Science
    Ph:   614-292-6370  Fax  614-292-2911
    Website:  www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~dbyron
    

    -- Dr. Donna K. Byron Assistant Professor OSU Computer Science and Engineering Ph: 614-292-6370 Fax 614-292-2911 Website: www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~dbyron



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