Call: Rhetorical Structure Theory and Related Formalisms

7th Workshop on Rhetorical Structure Theory and Related Formalisms/ NAACL 2019, June 6
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/disrpt2019

Study of coherence relations in frameworks such as RST, SDRT, and PDTB has experienced a revival in the last few years, in English and many other languages. Multiple sites are now actively engaged in the development of discourse parsers as a goal in itself, but also for applications such as sentiment analysis, argumentation mining, summarization, question answering, or machine translation evaluation. At the same time, evaluation of results in discourse parsing has proven complicated, and progress in integrating results across discourse treebanking frameworks has been slow.

The 2019 workshop aims to broaden the scope of discussion to include different discourse theories (especially, but not limited to, RST, SDRT, and PDTB). We are interested in applied papers with a computational orientation, resource papers and work on discourse parsing, as well as papers that advance the field with novel theoretical contributions and promote cross-framework fertilization.

We invite submissions on the following and related topics, handling any language(s), especially under-represented ones:

Discourse relations (segmentation, relation inventory, cognitive status of relations)
Discourse parsing in any formalism, including shallow and deep discourse parsing
Relation signaling (connectives and any other signals) and annotation
Applications of coherence relations in NLP

The invited speaker for the workshop will be Bonnie Webber (Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation, University of Edinburgh) - title: TBA.

This workshop also introduces the first iteration of a cross-formalism shared task on discourse unit segmentation. Since all major discourse parsing frameworks imply a segmentation of texts into segments, learning segmentations for and from diverse resources is a promising area for converging methods and insights. We will provide training, development and test datasets from all available languages in RST, SDRT, and PDTB, using a uniform format. Because different corpora, languages, and frameworks use different guidelines, the shared task will promote the design of flexible methods for dealing with various guidelines, and will
help to push forward the discussion of converging standards for discourse units. For datasets which have treebanks, we will evaluate in two different scenarios: with and without gold syntax.

NOTE: The training data for the shared task is available at https://github.com/disrpt/sharedtask2019.

Important Dates

Fri, Dec 28 - shared task sample data release
Mon, Jan 21 - training data release
Fri, Feb 15 - test data release
Thu, Feb 28 - papers due (shared task & regular workshop papers)
Wed, March 27 - notification of acceptance
Fri, April 5 - camera-ready papers due
June 6 - workshop

Organization
Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA)
Debopam Das (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)
Erick Galani Maziero (Universidade Federal de Lavras, Brazil)
Juliano Desiderato Antonio (Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil)
Mikel Iruskieta (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Program Committee
Stergos Afantenos, IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier, France
Farah Benamara, IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier, France
Irene Castellon, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Johann Christian Chiarcos, Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany
Maria Beatriz Nascimento Decat, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Iria da Cunha, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Flavius Frasincar, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Maria Eduarda Giering, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil
Nancy Green, University of North Carolina, USA
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
Kerstin Kunz, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany
Jiri Mirovsky, Charles University, Czech Republic
Anna Nedoluzhko, Charles University, Czech Republic
Thiago Pardo, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Lucie Polakova, Charles University, Czech Republic
Gisela Redeker, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Hannah Rohde, University of Edinburgh, UK
Gerardo Sierra, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
Christian Stab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Manfred Stede, Universität Potsdam, Germany
Juan-Manuel Torres, Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon, France
Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University, USA