Workshop Discourse studies and linguistic data science: Addressing challenges in interoperability, multilinguality and linguistic data processing – DiSLiDaS 2023
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
12-13 September 2023 (TBA)
Website: http://dislidas.mozajka.co
The fourth biennial conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2023) and Cost Action CA18209 NexusLinguarum (https://nexuslinguarum.eu) are glad to announce the second workshop Discourse studies and linguistic data science: Addressing challenges in interoperability, multilinguality and linguistic data processing – DiSLiDaS 2023.
Conference aims and topics
The workshop aims to follow through the topics discussed during DiSLiDaS 2022 and to gather current research advances in discourse analysis and representation, in the context of multilinguality, from a linguistic and computational perspective. We invite submissions addressing challenges such as interoperability, linguistic linked open data (LLOD), and language processing and analysis.
The workshop topics are the following (but not limited to):
Discourse comprises a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, such as discourse markers, discourse relations, and speaker attitude, which have been largely studied by different communities of practice from Linguistics and Computation, rendering several theoretical frameworks (for instance, RST, SDRT, PDTB, for discourse relations; appraisal theory for sentiment analysis,…), and technological approaches, such as transformer models, embeddings and alike. Nonetheless, there are open issues with regard to interoperability, multilinguality, and language processing, in particular, the existence of different annotation schemas, disambiguation, lack of training data for machine learning, scarcity of effective language phenomena detection and interpretation methods, diverse vocabularies, insufficient multilingual parallel corpora of non-dialogue and dialogue, initial stages of exploration of multimodality.
Discourse research is one of the central research areas of natural language processing (NLP) too. NLP research focuses on the formalisation, identification and discovery of semantic phenomena, dialogue exchange structure, and text coherence. Some of the technological approaches of NLP include the use of transformer models, word embeddings, linguistic linked open data, the constitution of aligned multilingual corpora, vocabularies of language phenomena and alike. Computational discourse explores the evidence that language consists not only of placing words in the right order but also of detecting and interpreting the meaning and deeper textual relations and organising ideas into a logical flow. The linguistic approaches study language phenomena referring to coherence and cohesiveness of discourse, lexical, phrasal, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic means to express discourse relations, represent their roles and build language resources for them.
Despite all the advances, there are still plenty of unresolved problems related to interoperability, multilinguality, and language processing. With the growth of the Semantic Web and Linguistic Linked Data, interoperability is key to reading, interpreting and adopting language resources. The existence of different annotation schemas to encode discourse relations constitutes a problem for data exchange and reuse and for theoretical consistency. The treatment of multilinguality is also complicated because of the insufficiency of multilingual parallel corpora of collections of non-dialogue and dialogue texts, which would allow systematic contrastive studies. As to language processing, the lack of training data for machine learning, coupled with the scarcity of effective language phenomena detection and interpretation methods, the coexistence of diverse vocabularies, and the minimal attention to the contribution of the tone of voice, intonation, gestures to the meaning and the informative value of discourse elements make the task of discourse processing still very challenging.
The workshop intends to be a discussion forum for researchers interested in addressing the aforementioned challenges and advancing the state-of-art in discourse studies and linguistic data science.
Programme
The Scientific Programme will include one invited talk and oral presentations.
Invited Speaker
Johan Bos, University of Groningen
Submissions
Submissions can be in the form of:
All submission lengths are given including references. Accepted submissions will be published by ACL in an open-access conference proceedings volume, free of charge for authors. The ACL templates should therefore be used for all conference submissions. As the reviewing process is single-blind, submissions should not be anonymised.
The workshop will be hybrid (face-to-face and remote). Note that at least one author of each accepted paper must register to present the paper at the workshop (either remotely or on-site). There will be no registration fee administered for participating in DiSLiDaS 2023.
Submissions must be submitted electronically via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dislidas2023
Important dates:
Time Zone: Anywhere on Earth
Papers due: May 19, 2023 -> May 30, 2023
Papers acceptance notifications: June, 16, 2023
Camera-ready papers due: June, 30, 2023