Questions, discourse and dialogue: 20 years after Making it Explicit

AISB 50th anniversary convention, Goldsmiths University of London, April 1st – 4th 2014.

Contact email for this symposium: [email protected] 

LOCATION
Goldsmiths University of London
Lewisham Way
London SE14 6NW, UK

http://www.gold.ac.uk

SCOPE OF THE SYMPOSIUM
The ability to engage in a dialogue has been trumpeted as a good indicator of general intelligent behaviour since Turing (1950).  Philosophers such as Hamblin (1970), Brandom (1994) and Davidson (2001) can be said to have proposed various types of linguistic rationalism, the notion that linguistic abilities are a pre- or co-requisite for rationality: in Brandom's terms, the hallmark of rationality is the ability to take part in the game of “giving and asking for reasons”.  Indeed, Deligiorgi (2002) already finds in Kant the notion that “rationality cannot be exercised by a solitary thinker” but depends on the communication of publicly criticisable judgments.  The capacity to engage in a dialogue could very well be AI-complete, i.e., employ all the skills abilities that constitute human-level intelligence.
 
The year 2014 marks several significant anniversaries: one of them is the 20th year
since the publication of Brandom's Making it Explicit,  a large, complex and difficult
work in the philosophy of language which Jürgen Habermas likened to Rawls' Theory of Justice in terms of its scope and importance within its field.  It is fair to say that
this work has so far had little direct influence on computational or formal approaches
to language, though some partial formalisations have been offered by Lance and Kremer, Kibble and Piwek.  This symposium will be loosely organised around various themes arising from Brandom's work, or questions provoked by it, though participants will not necessarily be expected to directly engage with his original texts.  As noted,
Brandom sees the game of “giving and asking for reasons” as central to human rationality or sapience, but it turns out that he has rather little to say about questions or any other speech acts apart from assertion.  Brandom stresses the importance of shared “material” inferences for successful communication, though it is far from clear how this common background understanding could be encoded in a computer system.
 
TOPICS OF INTEREST
 
Suitable subjects will include, but are not limited to:
Inference in dialogue
Commitments, norms, discourse obligations and dialogue games
Intentionality: can discourse and dialogue be modelled without reference
to mentalistic notions of intention and belief?
Comparison of formalisms for discourse analysis: e.g. RST, SDRT
Argumentation: analysis and representation of argument structure
Coherence:
- what is an appropriate response at a given point in a dialogue?
- what is the optimal ordering of propositions in a discourse?
- how should predicates, referring expressions and rhetorical relations be realised (verbally and/or non-verbally) so that the resulting utterance can be interpreted
naturally and fluently?
- Annotation schemes for discourse relations
Questions and answers:
- Does an account of questions presuppose a model of assertion (or vice versa)?
- Cognitive and computational models of question generation (QG)
- Question taxonomies
- Data collection and preparation for developing, training, and testing QG systems
- Annotation schemes and processes
- Evaluation of generated questions: metrics and methods (human, automatic, semi-automatic)
 
Contributions will be welcome from all disciplines which include discourse and dialogue in their subject matter, including computational linguistics, corpus analysis, psycholinguistics,  sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, argumentation theory, legal reasoning, literary theory and so on.

INVITED SPEAKER
Professor Ruth Kempson FBA, Kings College London/QMUL.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Dr Rodger Kibble, Goldsmiths University of London (UK)
Dr Paul Piwek, The Open University (UK)
Dr Geri Popova, Goldsmiths University of London (UK)

Contact email: [email protected]

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Robbert-Jan Beun, Utrecht University (Netherlands)
Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, North Carolina State University (US)
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
Marc Cavazza, Teesside University (UK)
Yasemin J Erden, St Mary's University College (UK)
Arash Eshghi, Heriot Watt University (UK)
Jonathan Ginzburg, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris 7 (France)
Pat Healey, QMUL (UK)
Eric Kow, IRIT (France)
James Lester, North Carolina State University (US)
Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas (US)
Brian Plüss, The Open University (UK)
Richard Power, The Open University (UK)
Rashmi Prasad, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (US)
Matthew Purver, QMUL (UK)
Hannes Rieser, University of Bielefeld (Germany)
Vasile Rus, University of Memphis (US)
Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Labs (US)
Matthew Stone, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Columbia University (US)
Laure Vieu, IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier (France)
Xuchen Yao, Johns Hopkins University (US)