Corpora Feb to May 2005: [Corpora-List] Website address for CfP

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2005 (MAD'05) is the sixth in a series of small-scale, high-quality workshops held bi-annually since 1995.
The theme of the 2005 WS is 'salience in discourse'.

Workshop Theme: Salience in Discourse

Understanding language involves mapping a linear sequence of information
units (in the case of texts: characters or words) to a structured
representation. Various proposals for such structures are under discussion,
but many of them share an underlying assumption: Structure arises from some
elements of the text being more prominent than others. The term salience is
often used for this phenomenon, but it comes in many different flavours.
The workshop aims to compare these flavours, to look for commonalities, but
also to sharpen distinctions where appropriate. We thus invite
contributions from linguistic, psychological, computational perspectives on
salience in discourse, including but not limited to notions such as the
following:

- Information structure is well known for a wide varitey of competing
conceptions, but they all relate to salience in one way or another:
focus/background, topic/focus, theme/rheme etc.
- Anaphora resolution (and, in the opposite direction, production of
referring expressions) can be modelled using salience, as it has been done
for instance in conceptions of referent accessibility (e.g., Prince 1981).
- Choices in sentence structure between coordination, subordination, or
nominalization can be claimed to have ramifications for discourse
processing, leading to conceptions of foreground/background structures on
the text level (e.g., Talmy 2000).
- Similarly, most theories of discourse structure involve salience, e.g..
the notion of nuclearity in 'Rhetorical structure theory' (RST,
Mann/Thompson 1988), or the distinction between coordinating and
subordinating relations in 'Segmented Discourse Representation Theory'
(SDRT, Asher/Lascarides 2003).
- The semantics of definite descriptions and pronouns have been analyzed in
terms of salience, for instance by Lewis (1979).
- Other tasks of language processing, such as word-sense disambiguation or
metaphor processing (e.g., Giora and Fein 2004), are sometimes modelled
with salience-inspired approaches.

Attendance:
Following the tradition of the earlier workshops, attendance will be
limited to 30 people. Speakers of accepted papers are automatically granted
a seat; the remaining ones are assigned on first-come-first-serve basis.

Invited speakers:
In addition to the regular paper sessions, the workshop features the
following invited talks:
- Kristiina Jokinen (Univ. of Helsinki) on salience in language and other
modalities in dialog
- Thomas Noll (TU Berlin) on salience in language and music
- Jon Oberlander (Univ. of Edinburgh) on salience in language and reasoning
- Michael Tanenhaus (Univ. of Rochester) on salience in language and vision

Submission:
Electronic submissions (PDF format) are strongly preferred. Papers should
not be longer than eight pages (including figures and references), using
11pt font. For the final versions of accepted papers, precise formatting
instructions (for Word and LateX) will be issued.

Send your submission until May 20, 2005 per email to mad05@ling.uni-potsdam.de

Program Committee:
Jennifer Arnold (Univ. of Rochester, USA)
Salvatore Attardo (Youngstown State University, USA)
Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Michael Grabski (TU Berlin, Germany)
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova (Univ. des Saarlandes, Germany)
Luuk Lagerwerf (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)
Massimo Poesio (University of Essex, UK)
Manfred Stede (Univ. Potsdam, Germany)
Alice ter Meulen (Center for Language and Cognition, Groningen, NL)

Schedule:
Submission deadline: May 20, 2005
Notification of acceptance: July 18, 2005
Final papers due: August 19, 2005
Workshop: Oct 5-8, 2005

Organizers:
Manfred Stede, Universitaet Potsdam
Michael Grabski, Technische Universitaet Berlin
Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

[Corpora-List] Website address for CfP MAD05: Salience in Discourse