15.3404, Calls: Discourse Analysis/Germany; Semantics/UK

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Sun Dec 5 15:58:13 UTC 2004 

LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3404. Sun Dec 05 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.3404, Calls: Discourse Analysis/Germany; Semantics/UK

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===========================Directory==============================

1)
Date: 03-Dec-2004
From: Claudia Sassen < claudia.sassen at uni-dortmund.de >
Subject: Constraints in Discourse

2)
Date: 02-Dec-2004
From: Manfred Sailer < manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de >
Subject: Workshop: Challenges & Alternatives to Strict Compositionality



-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:48:44
From: Claudia Sassen < claudia.sassen at uni-dortmund.de >
Subject: Constraints in Discourse


Full Title: Constraints in Discourse

Date: 03-Jun-2005 - 05-Jun-2005
Location: Dortmund, Germany
Contact Person: Claudia Sassen
Meeting Email: info at constraints-in-discourse.de
Web Site: http://www.constraints-in-discourse.de

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics;
Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2005

Meeting Description:

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for presenting recent
research on constraints in discourse. The target areas include the
recognition of discourse structure as well as the interpretation and
generation of discourse in a broad variety of domains. The workshop offers
a forum for researchers from diverse formal approaches, including but not
limited to:

- Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
- Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT)
- Tree Adjoining Grammars
- The QUD Modell
- Plan Based Reasoning
- Abductive Reasoning
- Gricean Pragmatics
- Speech Act Theory

Workshop on
Constraints in Discourse
3-5 June, 2005
Dortmund, Germany
http://www.constraints-in-discourse.de

For a long time, the development of precise frameworks of discourse
interpretation has been hampered by the lack of a deeper understanding of
the dependencies between different discourse units. The recent 15 years
have seen a considerable advance in this field. A number of strong
constraints have been proposed that restrict the sequencing and attaching
of segments at various descriptive levels, as well as the interpretation of
their interrelations. Early, and very influential, work on the sequencing
and ordering of discourse segments has been done by Grosz & Sidner (1986).
One of the best-known of the constraints on sequencing and accessibility of
expressions across sentence boundaries is the RFC (Right Frontier
Constraint), often associated with a paper of Polanyi (1988). Other
relevant constraints are, e.g. the CSC (Coordinate Structure Constraint,
Ross 1967) or the recently expressed MDC (Maximal Discourse Coherence,
Asher & Lascarides 2003) principle.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for presenting recent
research on constraints in discourse. The target areas include the
recognition of discourse structure as well as the interpretation and
generation of discourse in a broad variety of domains. The workshop offers
a forum for researchers from diverse formal approaches, including but not
limited to:

- Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
- Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT)
- Tree Adjoining Grammars
- The QUD Modell
- Plan Based Reasoning
- Abductive Reasoning
- Gricean Pragmatics
- Speech Act Theory

We invite talks that further our theoretical understanding of the role of
constraints in discourse, as well as empirical studies that shed light on
their empirical validity. The conference is explicitly intended for
discussion and comparison of theoretical accounts that lay the ground for
applications. It is not intended as a platform for system demonstrations.
Specific topics might relate to:

 - Anaphora Resolution
 - Co-reference
 - Dialogical vs. Monological Discourse
 - Questions and Answers
 - Lexicon and Discourse Relations
 - Cognitive Modeling
 - Underspecification and Nonmonotonic Inferences
    etc.

The organisers are planning to publish a selection of the results of the
workshop either as a special issue of a journal or as a book.

Publication (and workshop) language is English.

The workshop is endorsed by SIGdial, the Special Interest Group on
Discourse and Dialogue, and SIGsem, the Special Interest Group on
Semantics, of ACL.

Invited Speakers

Nicholas Asher, Univ. of Texas (Austin), USA
Claire Gardent, LORIA/CNRS, France
Barbara Grosz, Harvard Univ., USA
Livia Polanyi, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
David Schlangen, Univ. Potsdam, Germany

Paper Submission

Researchers interested in contributing a paper to the workshop are invited
to submit an abstract that spans not more than 3 pages in PDF or PS (single
column, 10pt font size, a4 paper, including a bibliography) using the form
at the workshop website (http://www.constraints-in-discourse.de). Reviews
will be done blindly; the abstracts may accordingly not include explicit
hints that allow the identification of the authors (such as ''in paper
(...) we show that'').

Important Dates

Conf: 3-5 June, 2005
Deadline for Submissions: 1 March, 2005
Notification of Acceptance: 1 April, 2005
Final Abstracts due: 15 May, 2005

Program Committee

Nicholas Asher, Univ. of Texas (Austin)
Anton Benz, Univ. of Southern Denmark, Kolding
Kurt Eberle, Lingenio GmbH, Germany
Claire Gardent, LORIA/CNRS, France
Barbara Grosz, Harvard Univ., USA
Anke Holler, Ruprecht-Karls-Univ., Germany
Peter Kuehnlein, Univ. Bielefeld, Germany
Livia Polanyi, Palo Alto Research Center
Claudia Sassen, Univ. Dortmund, Germany
David Schlangen, Univ. Potsdam, Germany

Organisation

Organisation Committee:
Anton Benz, Univ. of Southern Denmark, Kolding
Peter Kuehnlein, Univ. Bielefeld, Germany
Claudia Sassen, Univ. Dortmund, Germany

Local Organisation:
Claudia Sassen (claudia.sassen at uni-dortmund.de)

Coordinates

The workshop will take place from 3-5 June, 2005. It will be hosted by the
University of Dortmund, Germany. Dortmund is situated in the Eastern region
of the Ruhrgebiet and can easily be reached via car, airplane or train. The
venue will be Haus Bommerholz, the conference center of Univ. Dortmund.

Fees

We thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG = German NSF) for the
funding.

Their support allows us to keep the fees generally low. The fees (including
coffee breaks and lunch) are


People from countries with weak economy:  free
Students, including PhD students:  EUR 25
Other participants from Academia:  EUR 85
Participants from commercial enterprises:  EUR 170




-------------------------Message 2 ----------------------------------
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:48:48
From: Manfred Sailer < manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de >
Subject: Workshop: Challenges & Alternatives to Strict Compositionality



Full Title: Workshop on Empirical Challenges and Analytic Alternatives
to Strict Compositionality

Date: 08-Aug-2005 - 12-Aug-2005
Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Frank Richter
Meeting Email: fr at sfs.uni-tuebingen.de
Web Site: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~fr/esslli/05/

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 09-Mar-2005

Meeting Description and
First Call for Papers

Workshop on
Emprical Challenges and Analytic Alternatives
to Strict Compositionality

URL: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~fr/esslli/05/

August 8-12, 2005

Organized as part of
European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information
ESSLLI 2005 http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/esslli05/
8-19 August, 2005 in Edinburgh

Workshop Purpose:

Compositionality has been a key methodological theme in natural language
semantics. Recently, a number of innovative systems for combinatorial
semantics have been proposed which seem not to obey compositionality at
first sight. Such systems are based on unification, underspecification,
linear logic or categorial grammar, to name the most prominent research
areas. The motivation behind these systems is often computational, but the
mechanisms they employ also provide new insights and analytical
alternatives for outstanding problems in the combinatorial semantics of
natural languages. These include scope ambiguities, multiple exponents of
semantic operators, cohesion, ellipsis, coordination, and modifier
attachment ambiguities.

The workshop aims to provide a forum for advanced PhD students and
researchers whose interests lie in empirical issues or logic. It will give
them the opportunity to present and discuss their work with colleagues and
researchers who work in the broad subject areas represented at ESSLLI. We
wish to invite papers discussing linguistic data which pose a challenge to
compositionality as well as papers presenting new mechanisms for defining a
compositional semantics which can address well-known challenges in
innovative ways.

Workshop Topics:

Topics for submission may include but are not limited to:

* presentations of certain empirical phenomena which seem to challenge
strict compositionality. Empirical papers should point out precisely why
the discussed phenomenon poses analytical problems.
* presentations of semantic formalisms. This type of presentation
should stress the potential usefulness of the proposal for the analysis of
empirical challenges.
* papers which combine the empirical and formal aspects directly.

Submission Details:

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract for a 30-minute
presentation (followed by 15 minutes of discussion).

Submissions should

* not exceed 8 (eight) pages, including all figures and references.
* be in pdf (preferred), ps or ASCII.
* be sent electronically to manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de by
March 9, 2005 (see the deadlines listed below).
* be anonymous and, therefore, accompanied by a separate information
sheet containing: author name(s), affiliation(s), e-mail and postal
address(es), and the title of the paper.

The submissions will be reviewed anonymously by the workshop's programme
committee and additional reviewers. The accepted papers will appear in the
workshop proceedings published by ESSLLI. The final versions will be 15
pages, in pdf format. Details will be specified on the workshop homepage
(http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~fr/esslli/05/).

Workshop Format:

The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It
will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in
the first week of ESSLLI. There will be 2 slots for paper presentation and
discussion per session. On the first day the workshop organizers will give
an introduction to the topic.

Invited Speakers:

N.N.

Workshop Programme Committee:

* Sigrid Beck (Potsdam)
* Gosse Bouma (Groningen)
* Markus Egg (Saarbruecken)
* Howard Gregory (Goettingen)
* Fritz Hamm (Tuebingen)
* James Higginbotham (Los Angeles)
* Wilfrid Hodges (London)
* Pauline Jacobson (Providence)
* Graham Katz (Osnabrueck)
* Albert Ortmann (Duesseldorf)
* Gerald Penn (Toronto)
* Adam Przepiorkowski (Warsaw)
* Frank Richter (Tuebingen, co-chair)
* Manfred Sailer (Goettingen, co-chair)
* Mark Steedman (Edinburgh)
* Henriette de Swart (Utrecht)
* Zoltan Szabo (Ithaca)
* Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)

Important Dates:

Submission: March 9, 2005
Notification: April 18, 2005
Preliminary programme: April 23, 2005
ESSLLI early registration: May 1, 2005
Final papers for proceedings: May 18, 2005
Final programme: June 22, 2005
Workshop dates: August 8-12, 2005

Local Arrangements:

All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to
register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper
will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee.
Moreover, a number of additional fee waiver grants will be made available
by the Organization Committee on a competitive basis and workshop
participants are eligible to apply for those.

There will be no reimbursement for travel costs and accommodation. Workshop
speakers who have difficulty in finding funding should contact the local
organizing committee to ask for the possibilities for a grant.

Further information:

About the workshop: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~fr/esslli/05/
About ESSLLI: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/esslli05/





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