keynote lecture 1
Discourse, Genre and Language Technology: Keynote lecture 1 at ICON 2009, at IIIT Hyderabad, by Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh.
Abstract
Researchers involved in IR and web search have recognized the value of
being able to deliver texts (web pages) that are relevant to users with
respect to not only topic, but also function. The formal name for
function is "genre" -- the communicative purpose of a text with respect
to its intended community. The main problems posed by genre for IR and
web search lie in recognizing what function or functions a text
fulfills -- ie, in classifying what genre(s) it belongs to. This will be the starting point for the talk.
The speaker will then move on to the growing awareness of genre among researchers in
Language Technology (LT). For LTs such as parsing and other
technologies focussed on the sentence -- including information
extraction, sentiment detection, textual entailment, and statistical
machine translation -- differences in genre mean differences in the
distribution of lexical elements and syntactic structures. LT should
be as able to adapt quickly and efficiently across genre, as it is
across topic.
For LTs focussed on multi-sentence discourse or on text as a whole --
nowadays comprising summarization and text generation, but in the
future, also extending to information extraction, textual entailment,
sentiment detection and statistical MT -- differences in genre can mean
differences in text structure (ie, how information is presented) and
differences in text pragmatics (ie, what role(s) information
plays). The development of discourse resources for languages such as
English, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Czech and Hindi will play a
significant role in enabling LT to induce and exploit text structure
and text pragmatics, and to adapt across genres.
organizing bodies
latest updates
23rd nov 2009
The technical schedule has been released. 
23rd nov 2009
Click here for details of the panel discussion.
contact us
ICON-2009 Secretariat
Language Technologies Research Centre
International Institute of Information Technology
Gachibowli
Hyderabad - 500032, India
Tel: +91-40.23001412
Fax: +91-40.66531413
icon2009@iiit.ac.in