<html>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>2nd CALL FOR PAPERS<br>
<br>
==================================================================================<br>
MODELLING AND DESCRIBING DISCOURSE ORGANISATION IN THE AGE OF THE DIGITAL
DOCUMENT <br>
==================================================================================<br>
<br>
Workshop proposed by ATALA (Association pour le traitement
automatique des langues)- <br>
as part of the SEMAINE DU DOCUMENT NUMERIQUE (Digital Document
Week)(<</font><a href="http://www.univ-lr.fr/sdn2004" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF">www.univ-lr.fr/sdn2004</a>>)</font>
<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>La Rochelle, France, 22 juin
2004<br>
<br>
organised by Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley,<br>
Equipe de recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique/Université de Toulouse-Le
Mirail (pery@univ-tlse2.fr)<br>
<br>
<br>
The Digital Document Week aims to gather research communities dealing
with digital documents from a variety of angles: media, technical and
social modes of mediation, relation with human activity. Within this
framework,the ATALA workshop wishes to broach these questions from a
linguistic point of view, focussing on digital documents as discourse,
characterised by an internal organisation which needs to be understood
and may be exploited in computer-based systems. The workshop aims to
bring together three research areas concerned with the development of
digital documents: the study of discourse organisation, corpus
linguistics, computer-based applications for the exploitation of digital
documents.<br>
<br>
For text and discourse linguistics, the proliferation of digital
documents leads to new opportunities and new research questions, such
as:<br>
- the application of corpus analysis methods to discourse: what kind of
data can be regarded as relevant at this level of linguistic
investigation?<br>
- the development of novel ways of accessing documents, which leads to a
new emphasis on text structure and the potential exploitation of surface
markers;<br>
- the impact of new document types on basic concepts in the field:
cohesion, coherence, metadiscursive signalling.<br>
<br>
This workshop on written discourse organisation aims to bring together
research from three domains which must seek points of convergence in the
light of these new prospects:<br>
<br>
<br>
1. Discourse organisation<br>
<br>
In order to apprehend a sequence of utterances as discourse, it is
necessary to understand its organisation (to identify its segments and
perceive their hierarchy and their relations). An old and fertile
tradition approaches discourse organisation via the notion of discourse
relations: semantico-pragmatic links between segments (propositions or
sets of propositions) (cf. Péry-Woodley (ed) 2001). Other modes of
organisation may be envisaged, via the notion of theme or topic for
instance, or more recently through the discourse framing hypothesis
(Charolles 1997). Research in this field can be placed in a continuum
from pure “conceptual” modelling to empirical methods (automatic
segmenting, cf. Hearst 1997; shallow analyses human or automatic -
cf. Teufel et Moens 1999). The challenge is to hold both ends of the
continuum in order to draw connections between the way “things are put”
in texts and the processes underlying discourse organisation at different
levels of granularity (local vs. global organisation). The relationship
between modelling approaches and empirical research has often seemed
problematic, with empirical studies running the risk of losing track of
structure as they focus on surface markers, while conceptual models tend
to be difficult to test empirically. Corpus-based approaches
greatly facilitated by progression into the digital age are in the
process of bringing considerable changes in the discourse field, as they
have done elsewhere in linguistics (Conrad 2002).<br>
<br>
<br>
2. Corpus-based studies of linguistic correlates of discourse
organisation<br>
<br>
As noted by several authors (Biber et al 1998 inter alia), though
research on discourse organisation tends to make regular use of authentic
data, the corpus is often seen as a source of examples rather than the
object of the analysis as such. The implementation of a fully-fledged
“corpus approach” in the field of discourse organisation carries with it
many difficulties: corpus construction (common sampling-based techniques
make it impossible…), the role of quantitative analysis, and most of all
definition of relevant data making it possible to draw the connection
between surface markers (which may be just epiphenomena) and the multiple
principles underlying complex hierarchic organisation. <br>
A gap can also be observed between linguistic approaches (low coverage
and high reliability) and numerical approaches (high coverage and low
reliability). Articulating these approaches may open new prospects,
leading to fresh insights into discourse organisation principles as well
as more operational methods for applications.<br>
<br>
<br>
3. Computer-based systems for the exploitation of digital documents<br>
<br>
Applications for which the relevant unit is the whole document are little
concerned by questions of discourse organisation, but those concerned
with intra-document browsing, selective synthesis or multi-level
visualisation must work their way inside the documents and therefore
cannot consider them as simple “bags of words”: they have to take into
account the organisation into thematic or rhetorical chunks and text
architecture (cf. Luc & Virbel 2001). These objectives bring about
new research questions, in particular around the articulation of
different organisational levels in long documents (where browsing aids
acquire particular relevance).<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
This call for papers concerns researchers who are already working on
these interactions, as well as those whose work is in one of the domains
referred to but who are interested in a dialogue with other discourse
approaches. Descriptive studies which pay specific attention to
methodology will be particularly welcome. <br>
<br>
<br>
Some relevant themes (non-exhaustive list):<br>
- identification of objects or text zones corresponding to text or
discourse acts (conclusions, explanations, evaluations, …)<br>
- discourse organisation markers (from markers to relations: inductive
approach): connection, indexing (discourse frames), textual
metadiscourse<br>
- linguistic characterisation of discourse functions (from functions to
markers: deductive approach)<br>
- segmentation (automatic or manual): “topic shifts”, clues to segment
boundaries (lexico-syntactic, typographical, dispositional) <br>
- articulation between local and global organisation<br>
- impact of discourse genre on discourse organisation and its linguistic
markers<br>
- analysis and exploitation of document architecture<br>
- topological approaches<br>
- discourse annotation<br>
<br>
<br>
SUBMISSION (MODALITIES)<br>
<br>
A summary (2-4 pages, Word, pdf or ps) to be e-mailed by January 30th
2004 to Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley (<pery@univ-tlse2.fr>).<br>
<br>
Notification of acceptance will be given by March 15th 2004.<br>
<br>
***************************************************************************<br>
<br>
References<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><br>
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics:
Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.<br>
Conrad, S. (2002). Corpus linguistics approaches for discourse analysis.
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 75-95.<br>
Charolles, M. (1997). L'encadrement du discours : Univers, champs,
domaines et espaces (Cahier de Recherche Linguistique 6): Université de
Nancy2.<br>
Hearst, M. (1997). TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph
subtopic passages. Computational Linguistics, 23(1), 33-64.<br>
Luc, C., & Virbel, J. (2001). Le modèle d'architecture textuelle :
fondements et expérimentation. Verbum, 23(1), 103-123.<br>
Péry-Woodley, M.-P. (ed.) (2001). Cohérence et relations de discours à
l'écrit. Présentation. Verbum, 23(1).<br>
Teufel S. & Moens, M. (1999). Discourse-level argumentation in
scientific articles: human and automatic annotation. In: Towards
Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging. ACL 1999 Workshop. <br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
___<br>
Marie-Paule PERY-WOODLEY<br>
___________________________________________________________________<br>
ERSS / Sciences du Langage<br>
Universite de Toulouse Le
Mirail<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Tel.:
33(0)5 61 50 46 76/-36 09<br>
5 allees
Antonio-Machado<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Fax:
33(0)5 61 50 42 12<br>
F-31058 TOULOUSE CEDEX<x-tab> </x-tab>
<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Email:
pery@univ-tlse2.fr</html>