Appel: TALN 04 : SDRT workshop

Tue Nov 18 08:10:42 UTC 2003

Call for papers

SDRT workshop of TALN-04

TALN (Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel) is the francophone
annual conference on NLP.

TALN'04 (http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/.) will be held in
conjunction with JEP 2004 (Journées d'Etude sur la Parole) in Fez,
Morocco, from 19 to 22 April 2004, under the aegis of the Association
Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP) and of the Association
pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues (ATALA, the French
equivalent of ACL).

The workhop on SDRT will be held on April 22 2004.

Official languages are French and English.

Topic

Papers are invited for thirty-minute talks, including questions, on
theoretical and implementational issues on SDRT.

SDRT is an approach to discourse interpretation that has many
advantages for computational NLP research and applications. Originally
(Asher 1993) an extension of Hans Kamp's Discourse Representation
Theory (DRT), it combines the insights of dynamic semantics on
anaphora with a richer theory of discourse structure, in which each
clause plays one or more rhetorical functions within the
discourse. More than a decade of work has shown the theoretical
fruitfulness of marrying a rich notion of discourse structure with
dynamic semantics. For example, it has been shown that rhetorical
functions have semantic effects in the following domains:

- temporal and spatio-temporal structure of the text,

- pronominal anaphora,

- presupposition,

- resolution of bridging expressions (like definite descriptions),

- resolution of lexical and other ambiguities like VP ellipsis and
quantifier scope,

- analysis of plural quantification,

- calculation of implicatures and conversational goals of agents in
dialogue.

In addition to these theoretical aspects, SDRT has been designed from
the outset to aid with implementation in automated or semi-automated
textual analysis and text generation. It is a modular theory which
contains both a theory of information content and a theory of
information packaging, i.e. how to construct the logical form of a
discourse. The former is straightforwardly an extension of dynamic
semantics, and any implementation of the dynamic semantic ideas
(e.g. DRT, DPL, DMG) is compatible with SDRT conception of discourse
content. The latter exploits diverse resources that are understood in
modular form, and it exploits also the notion of an underspecified
representation at several levels. An additional feature of SDRT is
that it uses a nonmonotonic system of inference.

The aim of this workshop is twofold : theoretical and implementational
issues on SDRT. So we expect papers either presenting the treatment of
a given linguistic phenomenon in SDRT with possibly a comparison with
treatments in other discourse semantics framework. Or papers
presenting some implementational issues, for example :

- How HPSG or LFG grammars can provide suitable inputs to fragments of
SDRT implementation?

- Is the inference engine used to compute logical forms for
discourse. Should this system itself be implemented or should
approximations, perhaps even monotonic ones, be used? How can we
expect the nonmonotonic logic to scale up for large scale
applications? How much logical inference do we really need for shallow
applications of SDRT?

- How to make use of statistical approaches to getting lexical
information and other information that would be useful in computing
discourse structure? How machine learning might apply to learning
rules for the computation of discourse structure in SDRT ?

All selected papers will be published in the proceedings.

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research work. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of
the program committee

Program committee:

Chairmen
Asher Nicholas (Austin), nasher at mail.la.utexas.edu
Danlos Laurence (Paris), laurence.danlos at linguist.jussieu.fr,

Members
Amsili Pascal (Paris), ,
Bras Myriam (Toulouse), bras@ univ-tlse2.fr
Corblin Francis (Paris), corblin at paris7.jussieu.fr,
Gaiffe Bertrand (Nancy), bertrand.gaiffe at loria.fr,
Kamp Hans (Stuttgart), Hans.Kamp at ims.uni-stuttgart.de,
Kruijff-Korbayova (Saarbrücken), korbay at coli.uni-sb.de,
Le Draoulec Anne (Toulouse), draoulec at univ-tlse2.fr,
Muller Philippe (Toulouse), muller at irit.fr,
Pustejovsky James (Boston),  jamesp at cs.brandeis.edu,
Roussarie Laurent (Paris), laurent.roussarie at linguist.jussieu.fr,
Vieu Laure (Toulouse), Laure.Vieu at irit.fr

Submission procedure

Submitted papers must not exceed ten pages, in Times 12, single spaced
(about 3000 words), including figures, examples and references.  A
LaTeX style file and a Word template are available on the web site of
the conference:

Papers MUST be sent in PDF format
To : Laurence.Danlos at linguist.jussieu.fr
subject: SDRT-04 paper.

Important

All the PDF versions must be in A4 format, and not US Letter.

Submission deadline: 15 January 2004

Notification to authors: 20 February 2004

Camera-ready: 8 March 2004

SDRT workshop: 22 April 2004

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message diffusé par la liste Langage Naturel <LN at cines.fr>
Informations, abonnement : http://www.biomath.jussieu.fr/LN/LN-F/
English version          : http://www.biomath.jussieu.fr/LN/LN/
Archives                 : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ln.html

La liste LN est parrainée par l'ATALA (Association pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues)
Information et adhésion  : http://www.atala.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------