Formal and experimental approaches to discourse particles and modal adverbs

Discourse particles and modal adverbs form a borderline case between semantics and pragmatics and so can be the source of new insights in these areas. The use of particles has been connected with discourse relations and other coherence relations, the relation between semantic content and discourse context, especially the mutual knowledge and the common discourse goals of the discourse participants, with expression of speaker beliefs, desires and intentions and with the control of interpretations that go beyond semantic content, i.e. explicatures and implicatures. And, last but not least, particles and modal adverbs can contribute to expressive and other non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning. From the perspective of computational linguistics, these words are a promise, because it would seem that their treatment would help NLP systems to get a better grasp on the intentions of the user in interpretation and to achieve natural and comprehensible output in generation. However, they are also a challenge, because their analysis seems to involve concepts beyond current levels of sophistication. The workshop proposes to collect contributions to the formal description and implementation of discourse particles and modal adverbs. This third edition of workshop will in addition have a focus on the experimental investigation of the use and interpretation of discourse particles and modal adverbs, with a special view to the validation of formal and computational approaches.

[ program and abstracts ]

[ call for papers ]

The workshop is organised in cooperation with the SIG Dialogue Systems of the Gesellschaft für Linguististische Datenverarbeitung (GLDV, http://www.gldv.org).