ACL 2012 Workshop on

Detecting Structure in Scholarly Discourse, DSSD2012

Web: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/dssd/index.php

July 12, 2012
International Convention Center Jeju
Republic of Korea

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission deadline: March 11, 2012


The detection of discourse structure in scientific documents is important
for a number of tasks, including biocuration efforts, text summarization,
error correction, information extraction and the creation of enriched
formats for scientific publishing. Currently, many parallel efforts exist to
detect a range of discourse elements at different levels of granularity and
for different purposes. Discourse elements detected include the statement of
facts, claims and hypotheses, the identification of methods and protocols,
and as the differentiation between new and existing work. In medical texts,
efforts are underway to automatically identify prescription and treatment
guidelines, patient characteristics, and to annotate research
data. Ambitious long-term goals include the modeling of argumentation and
rhetorical structure and more recently narrative structure, by recognizing
"motifs" inspired by folktale analysis.

A rich variety of feature classes is used to identify discourse elements,
including verb tense/mood/voice, semantic verb class, speculative language
or negation, various classes of stance markers, text-structural components,
or the location of references. These features are motivated by linguistic
inquiry into the detection of subjectivity, opinion, entailment, inference,
but also author stance and author disagreement, motif and focus.

The goal of the 2012 workshop "Detecting Structure in Scholarly Discourse"
is to discuss and compare the techniques and principles applied in these
various approaches, to consider ways in which they can complement each
other, and to initiate collaborations to develop standards for annotating
appropriate levels of discourse, with enhanced accuracy and usefulness.

We are inviting submissions of long papers describing original research work
that span the range from theory to application, including research on and
the practice of manual and automated annotation systems, and discuss
questions like the following:
- What correlations can be demonstrated among document structure,
argumentation and rhetorical functions?
- What are the text linguistic and philosophical motivations
underpinning current efforts to identify discourse structure? Are the
assumptions made by current text processing tools supported by discourse
linguistic research; are there unused opportunities for fruitful
cross-fertilization?
- Can we port parallel efforts from neighboring fields, such as motifs
in folktale research, to annotate and detect narrative structures?
- Which discourse annotation schemes are the most portable? Can they be
applied to both full papers and abstracts? Can they be applied to texts
in different domains and different genres (research papers, reviews,
patents, etc)?
- How can we compare annotations, and how can we decide which features,
approaches or techniques work best? What are the most topical use cases?
How can we evaluate performance and what are the most appropriate tasks?
- What corpora are currently available for comparing and contrasting
discourse annotation, and how can we improve and increase these?
- How applicable are discourse annotation efforts for improving methods
of publishing, detecting and correcting authors^Ò errors at the discourse
level, or summarizing scholarly text? How close are we to implementing
them at a production scale?


Important Dates
-----------------------------
March 11, 2012 submission deadline
April 15, 2012 notification of acceptance
April 30, 2012 camera-ready paper
July 12, 2012 workshop


Submission guidelines
---------------------------------------
Please use ACL style files listed in http://www.acl2012.org/call/sub01.asp
Authors are requested to submit their abstracts at:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/dssd2012/


Proceedings
-----------------------
The accepted papers will be published in the DSSD2012 Workshop Proceedings


Organizing Committee
---------------------------------------
Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester
Antal van den Bosch, Radboud University Nijmegen
Ágnes Sándor, Xerox Research Europe, Grenoble
Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware
Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs/Utrecht University


Contact: Anita de Waard, Disruptive Technology Director, Elsevier Labs
a.dewaard AT elsevier.com