Objective
DANDI aimed to:
-Facilitate communication and increase the interaction and scientific cooperation between European research centres involved in the study of dialogue and discourse.
-Encourage new axes of communication to form across consortia boundaries, thus stimulating new areas of collaboration and new research initiatives.
-Help create and strengthen a wider European community of researchers concerned with problems of cognition and language.
The project coordinated and stimulated scientific cooperation between European research centres involved in studying the question of how information is encoded in and extracted from discourse.
APPROACH AND METHODS
The key questions addressed by the Working Group were organised around the following topics:
-Questions and answers: what constitutes an appropriate answer to a given question? Can the process of integrating newly conveyed information with discourse-specific or domain knowledge be described as a process of cognitive questioning?
-Focus, topic, comment and presupposition: does the topic-comment structure of discourse reflect this process of cognitive questioning? What is the relation between topicality and presupposition?
-Intonation: how is the given/new and the topic/comment structure of discourse marked intonationally?
-Text coherence: what are the processing implications of explicit markers of text coherence? When a text seems to lack coherence, to what extent can extra material be accommodated in the discourse model to produce a coherent interpretation?
-Lexical semantics: how can words be stored in such a way that they can interact with the information emanating from preceding discourse, in generation as well as understanding?
To increase collaboration on these issues, DANDI provided a framework for visits to other research sites, the organisation of workshops and special interest groups, and the exchange of research results.
PROGRESS AND RESULTS
DANDI supports collaboration between existing research teams. The achievements, publications and potential for exploitation of the Working Group should be seen in this light.
Recent workshops include :
-Discourse Coherence (Edinburgh, April 1991)
-Negation (Corsendonck, May 1991)
-The Cognitive Science of NLP (Dublin, October 1991)
-Computational Semantics (Pitlochry, March 1992)
-Evaluation in Natural Language Processing and Speech (Edinburgh, April 1992)
POTENTIAL
In the final phase of DANDI, a number of forward-looking workshops were organised (viz. on the future of computational semantics and on the role of evaluation in NLP technology). These activities will continue in different EC-funded schemes.
Coordinator
EH8 9LW Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Participants (19)
3078 Everberg
X Koebenhavn
72070 Tübingen
6900 Lugano
68016 Mannheim
5000 LE Tilburg
6500 HE Nijmegen
6525 XD Nijmegen
66123 Saarbruecken
4000 Liege
1012 CZ Amsterdam
2610 Wilrijk
88 Manchester
0316 Oslo 3
CB2 3RF Cambridge
CO4 3SQ Colchester
20122 Milano
70174 Stuttgart
75005 Paris
