Integrating Perspectives on Discourse Annotation

Reflecting the substantial interest in analyzing language beyond the sentence level in linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and applied domains, this workshop aims at bringing together researchers from the various subdisciplines that are working on aspects of discourse annotation. Advances in formal pragmatics are extending the empirical reach of linguistic analyses. Computational linguistic research on dialogue and discourse structure has produced multi-layer corpus annotation efforts such as NXT Switchboard or the Penn Discourse Treebank. Applications include dialogue systems and argumentation mining.

This workshop is designed as a joint forum for the range of perspectives on discourse feeding and complementing each other. We are excited that Bonnie Webber and Manfred Stede have agreed to give invited talks. We welcome submission on the analysis and annotation of

• discourse relations, be it related to frameworks such as RST, SDRT, or applications such as argumentation mining, and
• information structural concepts (Topic/Focus, Givenness, Questions under Discussion).

Equally of interest are methodological issues related to such annotation, such as reflections on

• manual annotation, e.g., evaluating annotations schemes and the reliability of the annotation,
• crowdsourcing annotation, potentially supporting the annotation of some aspects for larger data sets, and
• the automatic labelling using computational approaches.

Relatedly, we are interested in a discussion of the sources of evidence that different annotation schemes and annotation methods rely on. Where are annotations based on linguistic forms (bottom-up observable in the language data) and where are they grounded in discourse properties (top-down, from context or task)?

The workshop is designed to foster the interaction and cooperation of researchers working in different frameworks and using different annotations methods and document the current state-of-the-art in the field of discourse annotation.

Organizers

Kordula De Kuthy (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany)