33.3624, Calls: Comp Ling, Disc Analysis, Text/Corpus Ling/German

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3624. Sun Nov 20 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3624, Calls: Comp Ling, Disc Analysis, Text/Corpus Ling/German

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Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:46:02
From: Anton Benz [benz at leibniz-zas.de]
Subject: Questions under Discussion: Annotation Challenge and Workshopy

 
Full Title: Questions under Discussion: Annotation Challenge and Workshop 
Short Title: QUDAnno22 

Date: 23-Feb-2023 - 24-Feb-2023
Location: Berlin, Germany 
Contact Person: Anton Benz
Meeting Email: benz at leibniz-zas.de
Web Site: https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/qud-challenge/index.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2022 

Meeting Description:

The QUDAnno22 Challenge consists in a joint effort of annotating three texts
distinguished by genre with text-structuring Questions under Discussion
(QUDs). At the workshop the results of the challenge will be discussed.
Submissions to the challenge count as submissions to the workshop. As a result
of the challenge, we plan an edited volume at Language Science Press (pending
final approval).

Background and Motivation:
QUDs are central to many discourse analyses that explain linguistic
regularities as a consequence of the assumption that the sentences and text
segments with which the regularities are associated are answers to an explicit
or implicit question. QUDs were early on used for explaining possible
sequences of dialogue moves (Carlson, 1983; Ginzburg, 1995), clarifying
information-structural concepts (e.g. the topic/focus distinction, Roberts,
2012 [1996]; van Kuppevelt, 1995), temporal progression and
foreground–background relations in narration (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987;
von Stutterheim & Klein, 1989), information structural constraints on
implicature (van Kuppevelt, 1996), representing discourse goals and defining
contextual relevance (Roberts, 2012 [1996]), and for analysing structure and
coherence of discourse, of both text and dialogue (Klein & von Stutterheim,
1987; van Kuppevelt, 1995). Since then, QUDs have been firmly established as
an analytic tool, leading to fruitful applications for a wide range of
linguistic phenomena.
Most theories assume that sentences are subordinated to a focus–congruent
question that is again subordinated to higher discourse-structuring questions
(see, for example, Klein & von Stutterheim 1987b, van Kuppevelt 1995, Roberts
2012 [1996]; see also Benz & Jasinskaja 2017). QUD-theories for phenomena such
as non-at-issue content, presupposition projection, and focus assume that the
phenomena can also depend on questions higher up in the hierarchy. Hence, a
proper test of these theories requires explicit knowledge of the relevant
discourse structuring questions.
Although there is an obvious need for QUD-annotated corpora, there has been
little work in this direction. Exceptions are e.g. De Kuthy et al. (2018),
Riester et al. (2018), Riester (2019) and Westera et al. (2020).

The Issue:
We think that this research gap does not exist by chance. For morphological
and syntactic features, there typically exist established criteria that
objectively decide how a text item should be annotated. It then only depends
on the clarity of annotation guidelines, the tag system, and the qualification
of the annotators how close the annotations come to the objectively correct
ones. For QUDs it needs to be proven or refuted whether there is an objective
text-structuring QUD-hierarchy that annotators just have to uncover. One
problem is posed by the many information structural features that QUDs are
supposed to explain, among them the given/new, focus/background, and
at-issue/not-at-issue distinction, for which it is an open question whether
they can all be predicted by a uniform question hierarchy. Another problem is
the representation of discourse goals that QUDs are also assumed to represent.
Annotating discourse goals in the form of QUDs makes it necessary to interpret
the text and the authors’ motivations. This is a task that can easily lead to
widely different results. However, testing specific claims about the role of
QUDs require an explicit representation of these goal-representing QUDs. For
example, to test whether the non-at-issue content of a sentence is definable
as content that does not provide relevant material for answering any of its
superordinated questions requires explicit knowledge of these questions.


2nd Call for Participation: 

The QUDAnno22 Challenge: 
Annotate three texts distinguished by genre with text-structuring Questions
under Discussion (QUDs) 

Purpose: 
Comparison of approaches, annotation guidelines, resulting QUD hierarchies,
and reports of dependencies between selected linguistic features on annotated
QUD structures 

Texts and resources: 
The texts and the QUDA tool with respective instructions can be found on the
QUDAnno22 webpage. (Note that the tool’s installation process has been
simplified since the first call for papers!)

The task: 
This challenge instigates a community effort to deeply annotate three texts
that belong to three different genres: an interview, a magazine car report,
and a narrative text (short story). The annotations are explorative expert
annotations. This means that each annotation team can start with their own
guidelines and objectives. The objectives can include the annotation of a
small subset of discourse features that the authors consider particularly
interesting. We do not expect uniform results. The result of this joint effort
is an annotated corpus that allows for a comparison of different approaches
and provides a working corpus for future research. This could consist, for
example, in independent annotations of additional linguistic features,
followed by a study of how strongly this feature correlates with the different
proposed QUD hierarchies in our corpus. 

As QUDs may be used for many different purposes, annotation teams may want to
concentrate on specific aspects. For inspiration (only), we mention here: 
- Concentrate on the given/new distinction: all material in QUDs must be
given; the main new information must be an answer to the QUD. 
- QUDs as devices for representing discourse topics: What a text segment is
about has to be asked for in a superordinate QUD. 
- Interaction with discourse relations: Do you follow an approach that
replaces discourse relations (Elaboration, Narration, Background) by QUDs, or
are the QUDs better considered an additional discourse structuring device? 
- Do QUD analyses correlate in a meaningful way with morphosyntactic markers
of information structure? 
- Mapping between QUDs and discourse purposes 
- Is there a meaningful distinction between main content and side content? 
- Does an annotation approach chosen for one text genre work equally well for
the other text genres? 

Start of the challenge: June 2022
Information about texts, tools, guidelines, and submission information can be
found on the QUDAnno22 webpage
(https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/qud-challenge/index.html) 
Results will be discussed at a workshop on 23.-24. Feb. 2023. Submissions to
the challenge count as submissions to the workshop. As a result of the
challenge, we plan an edited volume at Language Science Press (pending final
approval). 

The organizing committee of the challenge: 
Anton Benz: Benz(at)leibniz-zas.de 
Christoph Hesse: Hesse(at)leibniz-zas.de 
Ralf Klabunde: ralf.klabunde(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de 
Maurice Langner: maurice.langner(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de 
Tatjana Scheffler: tatjana.scheffler(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de 
Arndt Riester: arndt.riester(at)uni-bielefeld.de 
Oliver Deck: oliver.deck(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de




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