[E-CFP] ACL'99 Workshop on Discourse - Reference Relationship ---- Final remainder

[Dan Cristea]

************** Apologies for multiple copies ****************


Plese notify that this is the last week before the deadline:

ACL'99 WORKSHOP ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DISCOURSE/DIALOGUE STRUCTURE
AND REFERENCE
June 21 1999, University of Maryland

Endorsed by SIGDIAL, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Special Interest Group (SIG) on Discourse and Dialogue.

CALL FOR PAPERS

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:

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

2.Psycholinguistic issues:

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

3.Corpus-specific issues:

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

4.Representation issues:

•how should discourse/dialogue structures and referents be represented?
•how should one represent the relationship between them: as preferences or
as constraints?

5.Algorithmic issues:

•how can discourse/dialogue structures, referents, and co-referential links
be identified and computed?
•knowledge-intensive vs. shallow approaches
•rule-driven vs. statistical vs. corpus-based approaches
•Wordnet-based approaches
•how do discourse/dialogue structure and referential expressions interact
in natural language generation?

6.General issues:

•what are the commonalities of current approaches to studying the relation
between discourse/dialogue and referents?
•what are the differences?
•what are the arguments against a relation between discourse/dialogue
structure and reference?
•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 Press.

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 with the traditional two-column ACL Proceedings format.
Style files can be downloaded from http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/stylefiles/ or
from ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/Proceedings/.

Submission 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 at 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 - University "A.I. Cuza" of Iasi, Romania.
•Nancy Ide - Vassar College, USA.
•Daniel Marcu - Information Sciences Institute/University of Southern
California, USA.

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)

Related Events

•ACL'99
•ACL'99 Thematic Session on Corpus-Based Approaches to Discourse and
Dialogue
•ACL'99 SIGDIAL Business Meeting
•ACL'99 Workshop on Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging
•ACL'99 Workshop on Coreference and Its Applications
•EuroLAN'99 Summer School


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Dr. Dan Cristea
University "A.I.Cuza" Iasi     Phone: +40.32.146141
Dept. of Computer Science   Fax: +40.32.213330
16, Berthelot St.                  E-mail: dcristea at infoiasi.ro
6600 - Iasi                          URL: http://www.infoiasi.ro/~dcristea
Romania
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