»DiSLiDaS Workshop at Jerusalem NexusLinguarum Meeting enjoyed audience from 18 countries around the world«
NexusLinguarum organized a “Workshop Days” event in Jerusalem (23-24 May 2022), dealing with different topics related to language, methods of language processing and representation. One workshop was on Discourse studies and linguistic data science (DisLiDas), which was organized by the group around WG4, UC4.2.2 on Social sciences with the goal to study language phenomena revealing social attitudes profiles and conceive methods to detect and represent them. That is why the workshop was designed to touch upon both discourse and linguistic data science with the expectation to bring open questions, theoretical and practical insight about the analysis and generalization of linguistic data. More specifically, its goal was to gather current research advances in discourse analysis and representation, in the context of multilinguality, from a linguistic and computational perspective in order to discuss approaches addressing the challenges of interoperability, linguistic linked open data (LLOD), and language processing and analysis, and advance the state of the art in discourse analysis and representation.
We had the privilege to have a very strong international Programme Committee composed of leading scholars in discourse, language and natural language processing studies from around the world, including Nicholas Asher, CNRS/IRIT, Toulouse, France; Johan Bos, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Paul Buitelaar, NUI Galway, Ireland; Harry Bunt, Tilburg University, Netherlands; Philip Cimiano, University Bielefeld, Germany; Ludivine Crible, Ghent University; Maria Josep Cuenca, Universitat de València; Vera Demberg, University of Saarland, Germany; Jorge Gracia, University of Zaragoza, Spain; Mikel Iruskieta, University of the Basque Country, Spain; John McCrae, NUI Galway, Ireland; Anna Nedoluzhko, Charles University, Czech Republic; Ted Sanders, Utrecht University; Merel Scholman, University of Saarland, Germany; Manfred Stede, University Potsdam, Germany; Radoslava Trnavac, University of Belgrade, Serbia; Amir Zeldes, The Georgetown University, USA.
We also had an outstanding invited speaker – Bonnie Webber – from the University of Edinburgh, a renowned expert in the field of discourse, who gave a very engagingpresentation about the semantic role and interpretation of discourse connectives in text and about how information structure can act as cue to discourse relations.
As far as the audience is concerned, we had representatives from of 18 countries around the world, including Europe, North America, Asia, which made us very happy for the interest the workshop topic has generated. This was made possible by the hybrid format of the event that streamed the entire day the sessions online. All participants were invited to consider joining our group at NexusLinguarum.
The workshop programme consisted of 7 papers, split into two major categories 1) datasets and 2) theoretical approaches, that abounded of a variety of topics. Regarding the resources, issues related to the detection, translation and semantic and pragmatic roles of discourse markers and to the annotation of discourse relations and dialogue acts were discussed. In what concerns theoretical approaches, several proposals were presented tackling different problems: an ISO-based annotation scheme; a discourse structuring method based on questions-under- discussion (QUDs); a finer-grained set of information-providing tag categories; and an analysis of discourse relations in terms of the Continuity Hypothesis.
The discussion in the last part of the workshop, led to the proposition of further initiatives that would potentially go beyond of the scope of NexusLinguarum. Stay tuned at http://dislidas.mozajka.co. Mozaika, The Humanizing Technologies Lab has been the hosting organization of the workshop.
The Organizing committee
Chaya Liebeskind, Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem (Local organizer)
Purificação Silvano, Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, CLUP, Porto, Portugal
Christian Chiarcos, Applied Computational Linguistics, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Mariana Damova, Mozaika, Ltd., Sofia, Bulgaria
Giedre Valunaite Oleskevicienė, Mykolas Romeris University, Institute of Humanities, Vilnius, Lithuania
Dimitar Trajanov, Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia
Ciprian-Octavian Truica, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
Elena-Simona Apostol, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
Anna Bączkowska, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland