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Apologies for multiple
postings,
Manfred Stede, Universitaet Potsdam
Michael Grabski,
Technische Universitaet Berlin
Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam
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
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: Thu Feb 10 2005 - 16:33:06 MET