6.0432 SIGGEN: Intentionality in Discourse Relations (1/84)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 7 Jan 1993 12:24:25 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0432. Thursday, 7 Jan 1993.

Date: Wed, 6 Jan 93 18:08:21 +0100
From: ide@grtc.cnrs-mrs.fr (Nancy Ide)
Subject: SIGGEN Workshop on discourse relations


From: siggen@cs.rpi.edu


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 rambow@unagi.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)