Computational methods and statistics
in the annotation and analysis of discourse relations

Second TextLink Training School

The Second Training School of TextLink (COST Action IS1312) will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, from February 6th to 10th, 2017. It is hosted by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University.

The school will focus on the following topics: discourse annotation theories and their comparison, annotation issues (such as annotation consistency), statistically sound research methods, multilingual discourse annotation, and CCR (Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations) and transformations to/from other approaches. Emphasis will be put on practical lab sessions.

The school aims primarily at Ph.D. students, but is also open to postdoctoral researchers, masters degree students, and others. Places are limited (40 trainees). Priority will be given to Ph.D. students and young researchers of the institutions participating in TextLink.

TextLink (COST Action IS1312)

TextLink (Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe), COST Action IS1312, is an international project dedicated to studying and harmonizing approaches to annotation of discourse relations and especially discourse relational devices (DRDs). It aims at several goals: (1) identifying and creating a portal of existing discourse-related resources within Europe - including annotation tools, search tools, and discourse-annotated corpora; (2) delineating the dimensions and properties of discourse annotation across corpora; (3) organising these properties into a sharable taxonomy; (4) encouraging the use of this taxonomy in subsequent discourse annotation and in cross-lingual search and studies of devices that relate and structure discourse; and (5) promoting use of the portal, its resources and sharable taxonomy.

First TextLink Training School

The First TextLink Training School with the title "Methods and tools for the analysis of discourse relational devices" was organized by University of Valencia, Spain, from January 18th to 22nd, 2016. It covered topics such as coherence relations and DRD identification, cross-linguistic variation, corpus research, annotation theories and tools, and dictionaries/lexicons. There were several hands-on practical lab sessions and a research speed dating session where trainers and trainees talked in small groups about their ongoing research.