DT4TP: Discourse Theories for Text Planning Dublin, Ireland, December 15-18, 2020 |
Conference website | https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/workshopINLG2020/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dt4tp |
Submission deadline | October 6, 2020 |
The workshop “Discourse Theories for Text Planning” will take place during INLG 2020 (15-18 December) as a one-day virtual workshop.
Text or document planning as the mechanism of ordering messages in a coherent way for achieving a cohesive text has traditionally been realized by schemas or the establishment of rhetorical relations between messages and message sequences. Inspired by the descriptions of a comprehensive set of rhetorical relations in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), these relations have often been realized as planning operators for achieving a complete text. The rise of machine learning approaches for NLG tasks seems to hide the fact that RST-oriented text planning is by far not the only method for achieving linguistically relevant text plans.
Formal semantics and pragmatics offer a number of different theories on text organization and coherence phenomena whose explanatory power goes beyond the justified grouping of informational units, among them (Segmented) Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), Question-under-discussion (QUD) approaches, and probabilistic approaches to meaning. This workshop addresses the relevance of these theories for text planning.
The aim of this workshop is to explore the interplay of linguistic theories of text planning-related phenomena with computational approaches to text planning, be it rule-based or learning approaches, in order to bring these fields of expertise together.
We invite submission of extended abstracts (3 pages including references), related to all aspects of text planning from a linguistic, theoretical and computational point of view. Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following issues:
- computational models of text planning
- corpus annotation of text structures and its interaction with information structure, discourse relations, dialogue goals etc.
- formal approaches to pragmatics and their relation to issues of text planning
In order to foster the exchange of ideas, we intend a kind of semi-shared task for this workshop: We will provide a small corpus of annotated texts to be generated and a paper that addresses the workshop task so that each workshop speaker does not only present his/her own research, but outlines his or her own ideas on generating these texts. The analysis of one and the same texts from different theoretical perspectives should shed light on the pros and cons of using various theory-driven approaches to text planning. We will make the data available after the submission of the abstracts.
The workshop shall be of interest for linguists who are working at the interface of semantics, pragmatics and computational linguistics and people in the NLG community with an interest in linguistic theories of text organization.
For more information, please consult the workshop web page at: https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/workshopINLG2020/
Important dates:
October 6: Deadline for submissions
October 20: Notification of acceptance
November 20t: Camera-ready versions of the submissions
Programme Committee:
Nicholas Asher (IRIT Toulouse)
Anton Benz (ZAS Berlin)
Kees van Deemter (Utrecht University)
Claire Gardent (LORIA Nancy)
Christoph Hesse (ZAS Berlin)
Ralf Klabunde (Ruhr University Bochum)
Maurice Langner (Ruhr University Bochum)
Tatjana Scheffler (Potsdam University)