Lotte Hogeweg and Eric McCready. Workshop on formal approaches to discourse particles and modal adverbs

Discourse particles and modal adverbs form a borderline case in semantics and pragmatics and can be the source of new insights in these areas. Formal descriptions of their meaning and use are complex and seem to involve more dimensions than are usually taken into account. From the perspective of computational linguistics, discourse particles are a promise, because they indicate discourse relations and other coherence relations and so it would seem that their treatment would help NLP systems to get a better grasp on the intentions of the user and to achieve natural and comprehensible output. However, they are also a challenge, because their analysis seems to involve concepts that are beyond current levels of sophistication.
The workshop proposes to collect contributions to the theory and implementation of discourse particles and modal adverbs. There will be a special focus on the use of discourse particles in marking discourse structure and on experimental approaches.

Workshop webpage

Moodle site