Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including but not restricted to the following three themes:

1. Discourse Processing and Dialogue Systems

Discourse semantic and pragmatic issues in NLP applications such as text summarization, question answering, information retrieval including topics like:

  • Discourse structure, temporal structure, information structure
  • Discourse markers, cues and particles and their use
  • (Co-)Reference and anaphora resolution, metonymy and bridging resolution
  • Subjectivity, opinions and semantic orientation

Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems including topics such as:

  • Dialogue management models;
  • Speech and gesture, text and graphics integration;
  • Strategies for preventing, detecting or handling miscommunication (repair and correction types, clarification and under-specificity, grounding and feedback strategies);
  • Utilizing prosodic information for understanding and for disambiguation;

2. Corpora, Tools and Methodology

Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support, in particular:

  • Annotation tools and coding schemes;
  • Data resources for discourse and dialogue studies;
  • Corpus-based techniques and analysis (including machine learning);
  • Evaluation of systems and components, including methodology, metrics and case studies;

3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modeling

The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence) including the following issues:

  • The semantics/pragmatics of dialogue acts (including those which are less studied in the semantics/pragmatics framework);
  • Models of discourse/dialogue structure and their relation to referential and relational structure;
  • Prosody in discourse and dialogue;
  • Models of presupposition and accommodation; operational models of conversational implicature.