Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Annotating QUDs: Desiderata and Approaches (QUDAnno)

Organizer(s) Anton Benz, Christoph Hesse, Ralf Klabunde & Maurice Langner
Start of event 08.10.2021, 14.00 o'clock
End of event 08.10.2021, 19.40 o'clock
Venue Online, ZAS & U Bochum

QUDs are central to many analyses that explain linguistic regularities as a consequence of the assumption that the sentences and text segments with which the regularities are associated are answers to an explicit or implicit question. QUDs were early on used for explaining possible sequences of dialogue moves (Carlson, 1983; Ginzburg, 1996), clarifying information structural concepts (e.g. the topic/focus distinction, Roberts, 1996; van Kuppevelt, 1995; von Stutterheim, 1997), temporal progression and foreground–background relations in narration (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987), information structural constraints on implicature (van Kuppevelt, 1996), representing discourse goals and defining contextual relevance (Roberts, 1996), and for analysing structure and coherence of discourse, of both text and dialogue (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987; van Kuppevelt, 1995). Since then, QUDs have been firmly established as an analytic tool, leading to fruitful applications for a wide range of linguistic phenomena. As particularly influential proved Robert’s (1996) semantic account of focus in which she developed a model of QUD–stacks of super- and sub–ordinated questions such that answers to the latter provide partial answers to the super-ordinated questions. Most theories assume that sentences are subordinated to a focus–congruent question that is again subordinated to higher discourse structuring questions (see, for example, Klein & von Stutterheim 1987b, van Kuppevelt 1995, Roberts 1996a; see also Benz & Jasinskaja 2017). Given the centrality of discourse structuring questions in these theories, there is an obvious need for text corpora with annotated QUD structures. Some work has been done in this direction (see, in particular, Kuthy et al., 2018; Riester, 2019). However, further work is needed, in particular, a discussion is needed about the goals and guidelines that underlie QUD annotation so that the corpora can be fruitfully used for testing theoretical predictions.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from theoretical, applied, and computational linguistics interested in QUD approaches and their application in corpus creation and analysis. Points of interest include:

  • General desiderata for QUD-annotations
  • QUD-tree structures
  • implicit, partial, and follow-up QUDs
  • information structure, in particular: focus structure and information partitioning
  • modeling argumentative structure and rhetorical relations with QUDs
  • the at-issue/not-at-issue distinction
  • discourse goals/questions
  • QUDs and temporal progression

Friday, October 8th, 2021

All times are Central European Time (CET): Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw

14.00 – 14.20

 

Welcome

14.20 – 15.05

 

Craige Roberts (U Ohio)
Some Desiderata for QUD Annotation

15.20 – 16.05

 

Arndt Riester (U Bielefeld)

Recent specifications regarding QUD annotation

16.20 – 17.05

 

Christoph Hesse, Ralf Klabunde, Anton Benz (ZAS & U Bochum)

QUD-annotation of argumentative pragmatically rich texts

17.20 – 18.05

 

Edgar Onea (U Graz)

Questions in Perspective. From narrative text to a narrative web

18.20 – 19.05

 

Tatjana Scheffler (U Bochum)

Computational approaches to annotation of QUDs

19.10 – 19.30

 

Maurice Langner, Ralf Klabunde (U Bochum)

QUDA: A web-based tool for QUD annotations

Abstracts: for abstracts, please, click here.

Links for ZOOM:

Theme: QUDAnno

Time: 8. Okt. 2021 01:30 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Join Zoom-Meeting:

https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom.us/j/64903540155?pwd=R3hkQ05hUjRkazYzWldJK0pGeUFjdz09

Meeting-ID: 649 0354 0155

Passwort: 871336