Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

The last five years have seen a dramatic improvement in the ability of NLP systems to understand and produce words and sentences. This development has created a renewed interest in discourse problems as researchers move towards the processing of long-form text and conversations. There is a surge of activity in discourse parsing, coherence models, text summarization, corpora for discourse level reading comprehension, and discourse related/aided representation learning, to name a few. At this juncture, we envision that a workshop that brings together discourse experts and upcoming researchers will catalyze the speed and knowledge needed to solve such problems, as well as serve as a forum for the discussion of suitable datasets and reliable evaluation methods.

The previous workshops on discourse in machine translation (DiscoMT), linking lexical, sentential and discourse semantics (LSDSem), discourse structure in natural language generation (DSNNLG), discourse parsing and treebanking (DisRPT) and coreference (CORBON/CRAC), have shown that there is considerable interest and success in bringing together the community working on specific problems. We believe that the discourse community will also benefit from a general place forum where work ranging from corpus development/analysis to computational models, and evaluation is discussed, and desiderata can be drawn for future progress.

The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse brings together researchers interested in all aspects of discourse and its computational modeling. We welcome symbolic and probabilistic approaches, corpus development and analysis, as well as machine and deep learning approaches to discourse. We appreciate theoretical contributions as well as practical applications, including demos of systems and tools. The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for the community of NLP researchers working on all aspects of discourse.

Important dates

The workshop will take place during EMNLP 2020, thus on November 19, 2020.

12 June, 2020: Call for Workshop Papers
~~15 Aug, 2020~~ 23 Aug, 2020: Workshop Papers Due (long, short, demo, extended abstracts)
29 Sept, 2020: Notification of Acceptance
10 Oct, 2020: Camera-ready papers due
20 Nov, 2020: Workshop Date

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”).

Contact

To contact the organizers, please send an email to: codi-workshop@googlegroups.com