Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2005 (MAD'05) is the sixth in a series of small-scale, high-quality workshops held bi-annually since 1995. (See list at bottom of page.)

Post-conference information

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse '05 was held in October, 2005, at Chorin near Berlin/Germany. The goal of the workshop was to shed light on the variety of terms of salience and to uncover the commonalities and differences of saliences in psycholinguistics, discourse studies, computational linguistics, and neighbouring disciplines.
We would like to thank the participants and the organizers for having it made an exciting and enjoiable experience. Special thanks to Wiebke Ramm for providing a series of photographs from the workshop. Meanwhile, the post-proceedings are in preparation, in order to formulate conclusions and achievements brought forward by the workshop, see the postproceedings site for detailled information.

Theme: Salience in Discourse

The notion of salience is used in different discourse-related fields of study. It is generally agreed that salience is required to explain the impact of context in language - however, in using salience, different disciplines emphasize different aspects of context-sensitivity. To give just two examples, approaches in the centering tradition interpret grammatical features in terms of degrees of 'salience', thereby explaining the form of anaphoric expressions and (partly) the local coherence of discourse. In a different vein, the term is also highly relevant for researchers in neuroinformatics seeking to explain the flow of attention in visual perception - which in turn influences grammatical and lexical decisions in describing the situations verbally.

The goal of the workshop is to shed light on the variety of terms of salience and to uncover the commonalities and differences of saliences in psycholinguistics, discourse studies, computational linguistics, and neighbouring disciplines. See the Call for Papers for more details.

Attendance Following the tradition of the earlier workshops, attendance will be limited to 30 people. Speakers of accepted papers are automatically granted a seat; the remaining ones are assigned on first-come-first-serve basis.

Invited speakers

• Jon Oberlander (University of Edinburgh):
  Salience and reasoning in symbolic communication
  
  
• Kristiina Jokinen (University of Helsinki):
  New information and topic in dialogue systems
  
  
• Thomas Noll (Technical University Berlin)
  Salience and musical discourse
  
  

• Manfred Stede, Universität Potsdam
• Michael Grabski, Technische Universität Berlin
• Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• 1995 Egmond-aan-zee, NL
• 1997 Utrecht, NL
• 1999 Edinburgh, UK
• 2001 Ittre, BE
• 2003 Driebergen, NL

 last update

15/05/2007