CALL FOR PAPERS

ACL'99 Workshop on the Relationship Between
Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference
June 21 1999

University of Maryland

Endorsed by SIGDIAL, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Discourse and Dialogue.

The relationship between the structure of discourse and dialogue and the use of referring expressions has been the focus of much research in linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Although individual efforts have been couched in a variety of frameworks ranging from (S)DRT and RST to Centering, they all share two underlying assumptions:

  1. The structure of discourse affects the interpretation of referring expressions and the space of anaphoric accessibility. 

  2. The use of referring expressions restricts the set of possible discourse interpretations.

However, most approaches address only one of these two views on the relation between structure and reference. And although several theories explaining this relationship exist, few have made a significant impact on practical applications such as discourse parsing, summarization, generation, and name-entity recognition.

This workshop will provide a forum for researchers in all areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics who are interested in advancing the state of the art in understanding the relationship between discourse/dialogue structure and reference. Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics and issues:

  1. Linguistic issues:

      • what is the relation between lexico-grammatical constructs, referring expressions, and the structure of discourse/dialogue?

  2. Psycholinguistic issues:

      • how does the use of referents affect the human interpretation of discourse/dialogue?

  3. Corpus-specific issues:

      • what coding schemata and annotation tools should one use in order to encode the relation between discourse/dialogue structure and reference?

  4. Representation issues:

      • how should discourse/dialogue structures and referents be represented?
      • how should one represent the relationship between them: as preferences; or as constraints?

  5. Algorithmic issues:

      • how can discourse/dialogue structures, referents, and co-referential links be identified and computed?
      • knowledge-intensive vs. shallow approaches
      • rule-driven vs. statistical vs. corpus-based approaches
      • Wordnet-based approaches
      • how do discourse/dialogue structure and referential expressions interact in natural language generation?

  6. General issues:

      • what are the commonalities of current approaches to studying the relation between discourse/dialogue and referents?
      • what are the differences?
      • what are the arguments against a relation between discourse/dialogue structure and reference?
      • how language-dependent is the relation between discourse/dialogue structure and reference?

Organizing Committee:

  • Dan Cristea - University "A.I. Cuza" of Iasi, Romania.

  • Nancy Ide - Vassar College, USA.

  • Daniel Marcu - Information Sciences Institute/University of Southern California, USA.

Program Committee:

  • Nicholas Asher (University of Texas)

  • Eugene Charniak (Brown University)

  • Udo Hahn (Freiburg University)

  • Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corp.)

  • Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)

  • Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh)

  • Ehud Reiter (University of Aberdeen)

  • Michael Strube (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Wietske Vonk (Max Planck Institute)

  • Marilyn Walker (AT&T)

Preliminary Program

8:35-8:45 Opening
Reference and Pragmatics
8:45-9:10 Robert Kasper, Paul Davis, and Craige Roberts An Integrated Approach for Reference and Presupposition Resolution.
9:10-9:35 Tomoko Matsui Approaches to Japanese Zero Pronouns: Centering and Relevance
Reference in Implemented Systems
9:35-10:00 Harksoo Kim, Jeong-Mi Cho, and Jungyun Seo Resolution using an Extended Centering Algorithm in a Multi-modal Dialogue System
10:00-10:25 Sanda Harabagiu and Steven Maiorano Cohesion, Coherence and Coreference
10:25-11:00 Coffee Break
Corpus-based Approaches
11:00-11:25 Elena Not, Lucia Tovena, and Massimo Zancanaro Positing and Resolving Bridging Anaphora in Deverbal NPs
11:25-11:50 Dan Cristea, Nancy Ide, Daniel Marcu, and Valentin Tablan Discourse Structure and Coreference: An Empirical Study
11:50-12:15 Jonathan DeCristofaro, Michael Strube, and Kathleen McCoy Building a Tool for Annotating Reference in Discourse
12:15-1:30 Lunch Break
Reference and Natural Language Generation
1:30-1:55 Kathleen McCoy and Michael Strube Generating Anaphoric Expressions: Pronoun of Definite Description?
1:55-2:20 Rodger Kibble Cb or not Cb? Centering Theory Applied to NLG
Reference and Psycholinguistics
2:20-2:45 Peter Gordon and Randall Hendrick Comprehension of Coreferential Expressions
2:45-3:15 Coffee Break
Semantic-Based Approaches
3:15-3:40 Helen Seville and Allan Ramsay Reference-based Discourse Structure for Reference Resolution
3:40-4:05 Frank Schilder Reference Hashed
4:05-4:30 Livia Polanyi and Martin van den Berg Logical Structure and Discourse Anaphora Resolution
4:30-5:15 Discussions

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