It is well-known that the texts at discourse level have properties going beyond individual sentences. These properties reveal texts in the frequency and distribution of words, word senses, referential forms and syntactic structures. Study of coherence relations in frameworks such as RST, SDRT, and PDTB has experienced a revival in the last few years, in English and many other languages. Multiple sites are now actively engaged in the development of discourse parsers as a goal in itself, but also for applications such as sentiment analysis, argumentation mining, summarization, question answering, or machine translation. Therefore, we believe that a workshop that bridges discourse experts and NLP researchers will catalyze the speed and knowledge needed to solve discourse problems, as well as serve as a forum for the discussion of suitable datasets and reliable discourse processing methods. We have a same vision with the previous workshops on discourse in machine translation (DiscoMT), linking lexical, sentential and discourse semantics (LSDSem), discourse structure in natural language generation (DSNNLG), discourse parsing and treebanking (DisRPT) and Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI) that there is considerable interest and success in bringing together the community working on specific problems.

The International Workshop on Discourse Processing brings together researchers interested in all aspects of discourse and its computational modeling. We invite submissions on the following and related topics, handling any language(s), and especially under-represented ones:

• discourse parsing (in any formalism, including shallow and deep discourse parsing)
• coherence models (anaphora, consistency, coreference, tense, aspect, modality, etc.)
• machine translation (statistical machine translation, neural machine translation, BERT, low-resourced machine translation, etc.)
• corpora for discourse level NLP applications (reading comprehension, discourse representation learning, text summarization etc.)
• discourse analysis for natural language processing

Invited Speakers

The invited speaker for the workshop will be

• Dr. Christian Hardmeier (Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation, University of Edinburgh, UK) – Confirmed
• Dr. Sujian Li (School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, China) – Confirmed
• Professor Bonnie Webber (Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation, University of Edinburgh, UK) – Confirmed
• Professor Rou Song (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China；School of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University, China) – Confirmed

Important dates

The workshop will take place during AACL-IJCNLP 2020, thus either December 4 or December 7, 2020.

• July 3, 2020 - Call for papers release
• September 18, 2020 – Paper submissions due
• October 23, 2020 – Notification
• November 6, 2020 - Camera-ready due

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h.

Submission

We solicit previously unpublished work, presented either as long or short papers, following the AACL_IJCNLP 2020 formatting guidelines at http://aacl2020.org/calls/papers/

Long papers should have at most 8 pages of content, not including references. Short papers are limited to 4 pages of content, not including references. There is no constraint on the size of the reference list.

Submissions should be anonymous and not disclose in any way the identity of the author(s).

Submissions should be made using the START system at https://www.softconf.com/aacl-ijcnlp2020/IWDP2020/

Contact

To contact the organizers, please send an email to: iwdp2020@126.com

Program co-chairs

Professor Qun Liu (Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies)

Professor Deyi Xiong (Tianjin University, China)

Professor Shili Ge (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China)

Dr. Xiaojun Zhang (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China)