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gusun.georgetown.edu>CALL FOR PAPERS (1) 3RD HISPANIC LINGUISTICS SYMPOSIUM and (2) 1999 CONFERENCE ON L1 AND L2 ACQUISITION OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON, DC OCTOBER 8 - 11, 1999 We cordially invite abstracts for either of the above conferences (that is, ONE abstract per presenter). Please submit FIVE copies of a one-page anonymous abstract (maximum 500 words plus bibliography/figures) in English or in any Hispanic language. Include with your submission the following information on a 4 x 6 index card: name(s), affiliation(s), title of your paper, mailing address, e-mail address, phone and fax numbers, and the name>of the conference for which you would like to be considered. E-mail or fax submissions will not be considered. Presentation time for papers will be limited to 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. THE DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS IS MAY 1, 1999. Presenters will be notified by JUNE 1, 1999. Submissions should be sent to: Abstract Committee 1999 Spanish Linguistics Conferences Department of Spanish & Portuguese Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057-1039 HTTP://www.georgetown.edu/departments/spanish/conferences _____________________________________________ Cristina Sanz Assistant Professor of Catalan & Spanish Applied Linguistics Director, Intensive Spanish Program Georgetown University http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/sanzc 202-687-7213Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
eecs.uic.edu>TOWARDS STANDARDS AND TOOLS FOR DISCOURSE TAGGING June 22, 1999 University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA URL: http://www.eecs.uic.edu/~bdieugen DESCRIPTION Discourse tagging assigns labels from a tag set to discourse units in texts or dialogues. The discourse units range from words and phrases, such as referring expressions, to multi-utterance units identified by criteria such as speaker intention or initiative. Just as the availability of syntactically annotated corpora has resulted in major advances in sentence-level natural language processing, we expect that corpora tagged for discourse features will lead to similar advances in discourse processing. Work on discourse tagging has gained momentum in the last 3-4 years. Three major initiatives in this area are: the Discourse Resource Initiative ( http://www.georgetown.edu/luperfoy/Discourse-Treebank/ ), that has organized yearly international workshops addressing the standardization of discourse tagging schemes for coreference, for dialogue acts, and for higher level discourse structures; MATE (http://mate.mip.ou.dk/), a project co-funded by the European Union, whose aim is to develop tools and standards for tagging spoken dialogue corpora at different levels, including the discourse level; the Global Document Annotation initiative ( http://www.etl.go.jp/etl/nl/GDA ), that aims at having Internet authors annotate their documents with a common standard tag set which allows machines to recognize the semantic and pragmatic structures of documents. Despite the progress made by these three initiatives, there is still much work to be done before there are widely accepted (standardized) discourse tagging schemes suitable for sharing and distribution across sites and projects. Moreover, there has not yet been an open forum to which researchers working in this area could participate. This workshop will provide such a forum. Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics and issues: 1. How can standardization for discourse tagging concretely be achieved? By developing a single coding scheme, or a set of coding schemes, one for each phenomenon of interest? Or rather, by developing some specification guidelines and mappings from one scheme to another? In some other way? 2. Cross-level coding: All of the initiatives mentioned above promote an approach in which coding schemes are developed at different levels, rather than an approach in which a monolithic scheme addresses all phenomena. Given this methodology, the issue of cross-level coding arises, namely, how can coding schemes for different levels take advantage of each other and allow coding of cross-level relationships? Is it possible to use corpus annotations at different annotation levels to examine the interdependence of linguistic phenomena? 3. Coding schemes and theories of discourse: Is it possible to develop coding schemes that faithfully reflect a discourse theory? If yes, is it desirable? Conversely, can corpora coded for discourse issues help advance our theoretical understanding of discourse phenomena? 4. Coding schemes and applications: Is it possible to design discourse coding schemes independently from the applications that the tagged corpora may be used to inform (e.g., to train a speech act classifier)? 5. Coding schemes and reliability: Thus far, experience in developing schemes for discourse phenomena that can be coded reliably has been mixed. Whatever the reason (e.g., lack of an overarching theory for discourse, genuine ambiguity and misunderstandings in real dialogue reflected in the coding, etc), how can we devise reliable coding schemes? What reliability measures should be used: are widely used measures (Kappa, Alpha, precision and recall) and the corresponding standards appropriate for discourse tagging? If not, what other measures can we use? Is reliability affected by whether naive or expert coders are used? 6.Tools for discourse tagging: What specific features of a tool does discourse tagging require? Can we just extend tools developed for other purposes, e.g. for syntactic tagging? Do we need to develop new tools? 7. Some paradigms for evaluating dialogue systems take advantage of the use of tagged corpora: How are discourse tagging and tagging for evaluation purposes related? Are there some discourse tags that may be used as evaluation tags or is it advisable to introduce another dimension of tagging? In addition to papers, prospective participants may be asked to do a small coding exercise before the workshop, in order to test out various tagging schemes. Prospective participants who have developed tools are welcome to bring a demo with them. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION Authors are requested to submit an electronic version of their papers. Send your electronic submission to both Marilyn Walker (walkerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue