QUDAnno22: QUDAnno Challenge 2022 |
Website | https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/qud-challenge/index.html |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qudanno22 |
Abstract registration deadline | November 30, 2022 |
Submission deadline | November 30, 2022 |
The QUDAnno22 Challenge: Annotate three texts distinguished by genre with text-structuring Questions under Discussion (QUDs)
Purpose: Comparison of approaches, annotation guidelines, resulting QUD hierarchies, and reports of dependencies between selected linguistic features on annotated QUD structures
Texts and resources: The texts and the QUDA tool with respective instructions can be found on the QUDAnno22 webpage. (Note that the tool’s installation process has been simplified since the first call for papers!)
The task: This challenge instigates a community effort to deeply annotate three texts that belong to three different genres: an interview, a magazine car report, and a narrative text (short story). The annotations are explorative expert annotations. This means that each annotation team can start with their own guidelines and objectives. The objectives can include the annotation of a small subset of discourse features that the authors consider particularly interesting. We do not expect uniform results. The result of this joint effort is an annotated corpus that allows for a comparison of different approaches and provides a working corpus for future research. This could consist, for example, in independent annotations of additional linguistic features, followed by a study of how strongly this feature correlates with the different proposed QUD hierarchies in our corpus.
As QUDs may be used for many different purposes, annotation teams may want to concentrate on specific aspects. For inspiration (only), we mention here:
- Concentrate on the given/new distinction: all material in QUDs must be given; the main new information must be an answer to the QUD.
- QUDs as devices for representing discourse topics: What a text segment is about has to be asked for in a superordinate QUD.
- Interaction with discourse relations: Do you follow an approach that replaces discourse relations (Elaboration, Narration, Background) by QUDs, or are the QUDs better considered an additional discourse structuring device?
- Do QUD analyses correlate in a meaningful way with morphosyntactic markers of information structure?
- Mapping between QUDs and discourse purposes- Is there a meaningful distinction between main content and side content?
- Does an annotation approach chosen for one text genre work equally well for the other text genres
The QUDAnno22 Challenge consists in a joint effort of annotating three texts distinguished by genre with text-structuring Questions under Discussion (QUDs). At the workshop the results of the challenge will be discussed. Submissions to the challenge count as submissions to the workshop. Please, add a short abstract with basic documentation about the annotation (2-3 pages). As a result of the challenge, we plan an edited volume at Language Science Press (pending final approval).
Background and Motivation: QUDs are central to many discourse analyses that explain linguistic regularities as a consequence of the assumption that the sentences and text segments with which the regularities are associated are answers to an explicit or implicit question. QUDs were early on used for explaining possible sequences of dialogue moves (Carlson, 1983; Ginzburg, 1995), clarifying information-structural concepts (e.g. the topic/focus distinction, Roberts, 2012 [1996]; van Kuppevelt, 1995), temporal progression and foreground–background relations in narration (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987; von Stutterheim & Klein, 1989), information structural constraints on implicature (van Kuppevelt, 1996), representing discourse goals and defining contextual relevance (Roberts, 2012 [1996]), and for analysing structure and coherence of discourse, of both text and dialogue (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987; van Kuppevelt, 1995). Since then, QUDs have been firmly established as an analytic tool, leading to fruitful applications for a wide range of linguistic phenomena.Most theories assume that sentences are subordinate to a focus-congruent question that is again subordinate to higher discourse-structuring questions (see, for example, Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987b; van Kuppevelt, 1995; Roberts, 2012 [1996]; see also Velleman & Beaver, 2016; Benz & Jasinskaja, 2017). QUD-theories for phenomena such as non-at-issue content, presupposition projection, and focus assume that the phenomena can also depend on questions higher up in the hierarchy. Hence, a proper test of these theories requires explicit knowledge of the relevant discourse structuring questions.Although there is an obvious need for QUD-annotated corpora, there has been little work in this direction. Exceptions are e.g. De Kuthy et al. (2018), Riester et al. (2018), Riester (2019) and Westera et al. (2020).
The Issue:We think that this research gap does not exist by chance. For morphological and syntactic features, there typically exist established criteria that objectively decide how a text item should be annotated. It then only depends on the clarity of annotation guidelines, the tag system, and the qualification of the annotators how close the annotations come to the objectively correct ones. For QUDs it needs to be proven or refuted whether there actually is an objective text-structuring QUD hierarchy that annotators just have to uncover. One problem is posed by the many information structural features that QUDs are supposed to explain, among them the given/new, focus/background, and at-issue/not-at-issue distinction, for which it is an open question whether they can all be predicted by a uniform question hierarchy. Another problem is the representation of discourse goals that QUDs are also assumed to represent. Annotating discourse goals in the form of QUDs makes it necessary to interpret the text and the authors’ motivations. This is a task that can easily lead to widely different results. However, testing specific claims about the role of QUDs requires an explicit representation of these goal-representing QUDs. For example, to test whether the non-at-issue content of a sentence is definable as content that does not provide relevant material for answering any of its superordinated questions requires explicit knowledge of these questions.
Submission Guidelines
Information about texts, tools, guidelines, and submission information can be found on the QUDAnno22 webpage (https://pragma.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/qud-challenge/index.html)
Results will be discussed at a workshop on 23.-24. Feb. 2023. Submissions to the challenge count as submissions to the workshop. As a result of the challenge, we plan an edited volume at Language Science Press (pending final approval).
Committees
Program Committee
- Anton Benz: Benz(at)leibniz-zas.de
- Christoph Hesse: Hesse(at)leibniz-zas.de
- Ralf Klabunde: ralf.klabunde(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Maurice Langner: maurice.langner(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Tatjana Scheffler: tatjana.scheffler(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Arndt Riester: arndt.riester(at)uni-bielefeld.deOliver
- Deck: oliver.deck(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Organizing committee
- Anton Benz: Benz(at)leibniz-zas.de
- Christoph Hesse: Hesse(at)leibniz-zas.de
- Ralf Klabunde: ralf.klabunde(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Maurice Langner: maurice.langner(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Tatjana Scheffler: tatjana.scheffler(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
- Arndt Riester: arndt.riester(at)uni-bielefeld.deOliver
- Deck: oliver.deck(at)ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Venue
The conference will be held at the Universiy of Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Anton Benz or one of the other members of the organizing committee