LINGUIST List 4.66

Wed 03 Feb 1993

Calls: Intentionality and Discourse, Student

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Owen Rambow, Workshop: Intentionality and Structure in Discourse Relations
2. Sheri Helsley, student conference

 CALL FOR PAPERS

 INTENTIONALITY AND STRUCTURE IN DISCOURSE RELATIONS

 21 June 1993
 Ohio State University
 Columbus, Ohio, USA

 A workshop sponsored by the Special Interest Group on
 Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) of the
 Association for Computational Linguistics

TOPICS OF INTEREST: Over the last few years, discourse structure relations
(often called "rhetorical relations") have been extensively discussed in
the text planning community. Two of the best known text planning
architectures, McKeown's TEXT and the ISI text planners, have explicitly
and successfully incorporated the idea of a bounded set of semantically
meaningful, domain-independent relations between discourse units. At the
same time, computational work on text structure development and analysis
has highlighted the need for intentionality (often called "communicative
goals") as well. The precise relationship between the rhetorical and
intentional types of knowledge is unclear. Making the issue even more
difficult, the theoretical status and essential nature of rhetorical
relations has never been clearly articulated, and while communicative goals
have been linked with Speech Acts and intentionality in general, the
precise territory of such goals has also never been defined. The goal of
this workshop is to bring together researchers from different fields,
including discourse understanding, discourse generation, and linguistic
discourse analysis, and to debate and explore the issues involved. In
particular, the workshop will address the following questions:

1. What is the evidence for the existence of rhetorical relations?
 What types of rhetorical relations are there?
2. What is the evidence for the existence of intentions? What types of
 intentions are useful to identify for communication?
3. What is the precise relationship between these two types of knowledge?
 Do intentional and rhetorical relations perform different functions
 (though they may be related), or are rhetorical relations the
 realizations of intentions, or should rhetorical relations be
 discarded as simply a misconstrual of intentions proper?
4. How do rhetorical relations interact with representations of Speaker's
 and Hearer's beliefs and desires?
5. How are rhetorical relations used in discourse understanding? How
 are linguistic clues and world knowledge brought to bear?

Note that this is not a workshop on a particular theory of rhetoric, but on
the theoretical foundations and implications of theories of discourse
structure and intentionality.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSION: Submissions are sought that address one or more of
the questions outlined above; they should be presented as position papers,
with reference to the author's own work. Submissions should be by email
(ASCII files) and should not exceed 2 ASCII pages (exclusive of
references). Submissions should be sent to rambowunagi.cis.upenn.edu.
Authors without access to electronic mail should send submissions to:

Owen Rambow
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
IRCS, Suite 400C
3401 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104, USA
Tel: (215) 898 0334, FAX: (215) 573 2048

SCHEDULE: Submissions are due March 1, with notification by April 5.

WORKSHOP INFORMATION: The workshop is being held in connection with the
31st Meeting of the ACL (22-26 June 1993). Attendance will be limited to
35-40 participants. The emphasis will be on discussion; invited speakers
and selected position papers will act as anchors in the debate.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Judy Delin (University of Sussex), Eduard Hovy (ISI),
Johanna Moore (University of Pittsburgh), Owen Rambow (University of
Pennsylvania)

1993 Graduate Conference in the English Disciplines

Old Dominion University's English Graduate Student Organization wil host a
Graduate Student Conference in the English Disciplines, including journalism,
professional writing, literature, the teaching of English, creative writing,
rhetoric, TESOL, linguistics and composition studies. The purpose of the
conference is to encourage graduate student participation in the academic com-
munity. Abstracts are invited for all areas of English. For futher informa-
tion contact Sheri Helsley or Mary Wright, English Department, Old Dominion
University, Norfolk, Virginia 23529 (804) 683-3991 E-mail JMB100fODUVM.
BITNET. Fax (804) 683-3241. Deadline: February 19, 1993