2nd CfP: Workshop Constraints in Discourse

Please apologize cross-postings

                                 Workshop on
                           Constraints in Discourse
                                3-5 June, 2005
                               Dortmund, Germany
                   http://www.constraints-in-discourse.de

For a long time, the development of precise frameworks of discourse
interpretation has been hampered by the lack of a deeper understanding
of the dependencies between different discourse units. The recent 15
years have seen a considerable advance in this field. A number of
strong constraints have been proposed that restrict the sequencing and
attaching of segments at various descriptive levels, as well as the
interpretation of their interrelations. Early, and very influential,
work on the sequencing and ordering of discourse segments has been
done by Grosz & Sidner (1986). One of the best-known of the
constraints on sequencing and accessibility of expressions across
sentence boundaries is the RFC (Right Frontier Constraint), often
associated with a paper of Polanyi (1988). Other relevant constraints
are, e.g. the CSC (Coordinate Structure Constraint, Ross 1967) or the
recently expressed MDC (Maximal Discourse Coherence, Asher &
Lascarides 2003) principle.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for presenting
recent research on constraints in discourse. The target areas include
the recognition of discourse structure as well as the interpretation
and generation of discourse in a broad variety of domains. The
workshop offers a forum for researchers from diverse formal
approaches, including but not limited to:

Re: CORPORA la reference dans les dialogues

Dear Hanane,

There are several dialogue corpora available via internet, eg see

Abu Shawar B and Atwell E.  (2003). "Machine Learning from dialogue corpora 
to generate chatbots", in Expert Update journal, Vol 6, No 3, pp 25-29
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/bshawar/papers/BCS_SGAI03a.pdf

- references at end of this paper include dialogue corpora:

Athel 2002 Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English: description,
http://www.athel.com/corpdes.html

CISD 2002 TRAINS Dialogue Corpus,
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/cisd/resources/trains.html

Kerr, B. (1983). Minnesota Corpus. University of Minnesota Graduate
School, Minneapolis, USA. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~bjkerr/CSC_DDL_Bib.htm

Mann W 2002 Dialog Diversity Corpus
http://wwwrcf.usc.edu/~billmann/diversity/DDivers-site.htm

MICASE 2002 MICASE online homepage, http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase/

Mishler E 1985 The discourse of medicine: dialectics of medical
interviews, New Jersey, Ablex
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~billmann/diversity/Tr.5.1a.gif

Nelson G 2002 International Corpus of English: the Singapore Corpus user
manual, http://wwwrcf.usc.edu/~billmann/diversity/ICE-SIN_Manual.PDF

RESEARCH POSITION IN LINGUISTICS / COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

New book

Dear All,

Slightly vulgar to advertise in this way, but I thought some of you may
be interested in a new book which Richard Xiao and I have written,
published by John Benjamins. Details below. Best,

Tony

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study

URL http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=SLCS%2073

    
Abstract
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the
development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured
exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to
express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first
corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation
aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to
achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to
linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both
the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level
model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and
sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional
nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and
four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This
exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated
misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the
literature.

Re: Another New book -> Netiquette

Santos Diana a écrit :

>About the advertising bit: I'm not sure whether this is wrong in terms
>of netiquete, but I think that people interested in discussing corpus
>linguistics subjects might even like to hear about these books. 
>  
>
As a simple reader of this list, I see nothing wrong with your post and 
Tony's. They are useful pieces of information, the kind I expect to 
receive from Corpora. Don't worry 

--

-- 
Jean Véronis
  http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/veronis
  http://aixtal.blogspot.com

Another New book

Dear All,

Maybe the same set of people (or at least of the same size of
corpora-list subscribers) is interested as well in my book, published
this spring by Rodopi:

Diana Santos. Translation-based corpus studies: Contrasting Portuguese
and English tense and aspect systems.

URL http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=LC+50

It is about contrastive studies based on parallel corpora, in the realm
of tense and aspect, with a strong emphasis in methodology.

About the advertising bit: I'm not sure whether this is wrong in terms
of netiquete, but I think that people interested in discussing corpus
linguistics subjects might even like to hear about these books. 
Maybe the corpora-list moderators should state their opinion/policy on
these matters? A special page with this kind of book announcements could
be provided in the corpora-list page, as an alternative to sending it to
everyone? What do you think?

Best,
Diana

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-corpora <at> lists.uib.no 
>> [mailto:owner-corpora <at> lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Mcenery, Tony
>> Sent: 1. desember 2004 14:43
>> To: corpus list
>> Subject: [Corpora-List] New book
>> 
>> Dear All,
>> 
>> Slightly vulgar to advertise in this way, but I thought some 
>> of you may
>> be interested in a new book which Richard Xiao and I have written,
>> published by John Benjamins. Details below. Best,
>> 
>> Tony
>> 
>> Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study

Re: Another New book

To everyone,

I agree with Jean Veronis.  Book announcements are useful and interesting. As long as they are clearly
related to corpora, I hope people will keep sending announcements about their books.

*********************************
Victoria Muehleisen

School of International Liberal Studies Waseda University
Nishi-Waseda 1-6-1
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050

E-mail: <vicky <at> waseda.jp> 
Home page: <www.f.waseda.jp/vicky>

Re: Another New book -> Netiquette

I have no problems with such postings either - they are not about
selling the book, they are about making our community aware
of their being around which could be very helpful for all researchers -
established and young alike

Regards
Ruslan

At 15:37 01/12/2004 +0100, Jean Veronis wrote:
>Santos Diana a écrit :
>
>>About the advertising bit: I'm not sure whether this is wrong in terms
>>of netiquete, but I think that people interested in discussing corpus
>>linguistics subjects might even like to hear about these books.
>As a simple reader of this list, I see nothing wrong with your post and 
>Tony's. They are useful pieces of information, the kind I expect to 
>receive from Corpora. Don't worry 
>
>--
>Jean Véronis
>  http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/veronis
>  http://aixtal.blogspot.com
>
>

Re: Another New book -> Netiquette

Hi all,
About the advertising bit and netiquette, I think that first and 
foremost, "the corpora-list moderators should state their opinion/policy 
on these matters?" as Diana noted too. But in my opinion, such data bit 
are allowed as long as:

1- They are relevant to corpora matters,
2- Repetitions do not occur, 
3- Purchasing details are referred to other pages other than corpora 
page, and of course,
4- No bragging or denigration of other works is practiced.

If observed, the nature of such data would shift from 'advertising' to 
kind of 'publicizing' which is admitted, regarding netiquette and users' 
desires, as if the author states his/her opinion over some corpora matter 
in a "comprehensive" manner and referred those interested "in advance" to 
a source of knowledge.

Ali Hajmohammadi,
MA student in Translation Studies,
Allameh Tabatabai University

another Semitic language - Assyrian