37.785, Confs: Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives (Netherlands)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-785. Thu Feb 26 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.785, Confs: Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives (Netherlands)

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Date: 24-Feb-2026
From: Merel C.J. Scholman [m.c.j.scholman at uu.nl]
Subject: Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives


Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational
Perspectives
Short Title: DETEC2026

Date: 17-Sep-2026 - 18-Sep-2026
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Contact: Merel Scholman
Contact Email: m.c.j.scholman at uu.nl
Meeting URL: https://detec2026.sites.uu.nl

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics

Submission Deadline: 11-May-2026

Comprehenders continuously generate expectations about upcoming
linguistic material using information from multiple sources, including
lexical and morpho-syntactic cues, prosody, discourse structure, world
knowledge, and communicative goals. These expectations shape
processing at all levels, from reference resolution and coherence
relations to pragmatic inference and conversational implicature.
DETEC 2026 provides a forum for interdisciplinary exchange between
theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to discourse
expectations. We invite contributions from linguistics,
psycholinguistics, cognitive science, NLP, and related fields that
address how expectations arise, how they can be measured and modeled,
and how they interact with linguistic structure and extra-linguistic
knowledge.
We invite abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters. Submissions may
address (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- The emergence of expectations during online comprehension.
- The nature of discourse expectations – how specific or abstract they
are.
- The interaction between local (lexical, syntactic) and global
(discourse, world knowledge) sources of prediction.
- Individual differences, adaptation, and learning in predictive
processing.
- Multimodal expectations across language, gesture, prosody, and
visual context.
- Probabilistic, Bayesian, and neural models of discourse
expectations.
- Surprisal- and prediction-based metrics for modeling discourse
processing.
- Insights from large language models for theories of discourse and
prediction.
The confirmed keynote speakers are:
- Paula Rubio-Fernandez (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
- Matthew Husband (University of Oxford)
Local Organisers:
- Merel C.J. Scholman, m.c.j.scholman at uu.nl
- Jet Hoek, jet.hoek at ru.nl
- Ted J.M. Sanders, t.j.m.sanders at uu.nl
*This conference is organized with support from the Dutch Research
Council (NWO) as part of the project “Searching for meaning:
Identifying and interpreting alternative discourse relation signals in
multi-modal language comprehension”, VI.Veni.231C.021.



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