Topics of Interest
We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three themes:
1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems
Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, information retrieval including topics like:
- Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
- Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
- (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
- Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:
- Dialogue management models;
- Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
- Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
- Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;
2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology
Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:
- Annotation tools and coding schemes;
- Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
- Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
- Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies;
3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:
- The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
- Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure;
- Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
- Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature.