Detecting Structure in Scholarly Discourse (DSSD2012)
Important Dates:
March 11, 2012 Submission Deadline
April 15, 2012 Notification of acceptance
April 30, 2012 Camera-ready papers due
July 12 or 13, 2012 Workshop
From the Call for Papers:
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.
Several workshops have been focused on the detection of some of these features in scientific text, such as speculation and negation in the 2010 workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing and the BioNLP’09 Shared Task, and hedging in the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task Learning to detect hedges and their scope in natural language textM. Other efforts that have included a clear focus on scientific discourse annotation include STIL2011 and Force11, the Future of Research Communications and e-Science. There have been several efforts to produce large-scale corpora in this field, such as BioScope, where negation and speculation information were annotated, and the GENIA Event corpus.
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.
This conference is being held in conjunction with ACL 2012.