WeSSLLI 2020 @ Brandeis
Please register here for WeSSLLI, WatchDial, or both.
See below for the WeSSLLI schedule of courses and workshops, and for the WeSSLLI+ESSLLI student session schedule.
The registration fee is $10. We will send you information for joining the event(s) shortly before the start of WeSSLLI on Saturday July 11.
Web Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (WeSSLLI) will be a fully virtual school, with five classes and no parallel sessions. The WeSSLLI Virtual Student Session, merged with ESSLLI Virtual Student Session, and the WeSSLLI courses and workshops will take place July 11-17, and Virtual SemDial (WatchDial) will follow on July 18-19.
We are working on hosting a full-scale in-person NASSLLI in the summer of 2021.
WeSSLLI 2020 Invited Courses and Workshops
- Robin Cooper, Staffan Larsson - Modelling Linguistic Communication Using Types [website]
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM EDT
Dates: Saturday July 11, Monday July 13, Wednesday July 15 - Friday July 17
- Elizabeth Coppock - Cross-linguistic Variation in Degree Semantics [website]
Time: 4:20 PM - 5:40 PM EDT
Dates: Saturday July 11, Monday July 13- Tuesday July 14, Thursday July 16 - Friday July 17
- Shalom Lappin - Deep Learning and the Nature of Linguistic Representation [website]
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM EDT
Dates: Monday July 13 - Friday July 17
- Natasha Korotkova - The Notional Category of Evidentiality [website]
Time: 2:35 PM - 3:55 PM EDT
Dates: Saturday July 11 - Sunday July 12, Tuesday July 14 - Wednesday July 15, Friday July 17
- Larry Moss - Workshop: Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning [website]
Time: Sunday: 4:20 PM - 6:20 PM EDT, All other days: 8:45 AM - 10:45 AM EDT
Dates: Sunday July 12 - Friday July 17
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Saturday, July 11
8:50 AM - 10:05 AM EDT: Talks Session 1
- Cancelling the Maxim of Quantity & Reasoning under Uncertainty
Cathy Agyemang
- The Falsity of the Consequent in Contrastive Conditionals
Hayley Ross
- A Cross-Linguistic Examination of Geminate Consonant Attrition
Rawan Hanini, Mariagrazia Sciannantena and Michelle Ciccone
10:10 AM - 10:40 AM EDT: Talks Session 2
- Towards a Cross-Linguistic Description of Morphological Causatives: Issues in Syntax-Semantics Linking
Valeria Generalova
Sunday, July 12
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM EDT: Talks Session 3
- Perspectives in Demonstrative Semantics
Rory Harder
- Reducing Homogeneity to Distributivity
Alexandros Kalomoiros
- The 'In' and 'According to' Prefixes
Merel Semeijn
- The Discourse Effect of "Just" in Imperative and Interrogative Utterances
William Thomas
1:00 PM - 2:20 PM EDT: Talks Session 4
- Gricean Secrets
Anthony Nguyen
- Analyzing and Comparing Speech Disfluency Patterns in Non-Native Dialogue: A Case Study
Iuliia Zaitova
- Conjunction and Disjunction in Probability Judgments
Cathy Agyemang
- Evidentiality and Epistemicity in Cantonese: The Case of wo5
Sophia Chan
Monday, July 13
7:30 AM - 8:30 AM EDT: Talks Session 5
- Formalizing Henkin-Style Completeness of an Axiomatic System for Propositional Logic
Asta Halkjær From
- A Logical Framework for Understanding Why
Yu Wei
2:35 PM - 3:55 PM EDT: Talks Session 6
- Interaction between Intonational and Syntactic Markers of Information Structure in Mandarin
Jing Ji
- A Gamified Approach to Teaching the Expression of Emotion in English to Native Speakers of Tone and Stress Languages
Natalie Mosseri, Jenny Ortega and Hadassa Dorville
- Distinctions in Articulatory Proficiency Between Monolinguals and Multilinguals of Varied Backgrounds: An Acoustic Analysis of Tongue Twisters
Crystal Gilbert, Beckie Dugaillard and Marianna Krivoshaev
- The Role of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in the Perception of Foreign-Accented English by Native Speakers
Anna Maria La Franceschina
Tuesday, July 14
7:30 AM - 8:30 AM EDT: Talks Session 7
- Assessing the Effect of Text Type on the Choice of Linguistic Mechanisms in Scientific Publications
Iverina Ivanova
- More Truthmakers for Vagueness
Shimpei Endo
1:00 PM - 2:20 PM EDT: Talks Session 8
- Hello Siri, Why Don't You Understand? - A Study on Grounding of Human and Agent Interlocutors in Dialogues
Wan Ching Ho
- A Pragmatic Account of Conventionalized Metaphors
Ioana Grosu
- 'She Has a Tattoo Where?': Cross-Linguistic Differences in Scalar Implicature Calculation
Danielle Dionne
Virtual Student Session
Exciting news! The ESSLLI 2020 Student Session will merge with the WeSSLLI 2020 Virtual Student Session (except for the reviewing process). The authors whose submissions are accepted to the WeSSLLI Virtual Student Session now have the opportunity to publish their work in a special Springer volume together with the best papers of the ESSLLI Student Sessions 2019 and 2020. Authors may also be interested in the ESSLLI Student Session if they prefer to submit a 4-page or 8-page paper rather than a 2-page abstract. See submission details on the Student Session page for more information.
WatchDial
WeSSLLI 2020 will be immediately followed by WatchDial - the 24th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue (SemDial), July 18-19.
WatchDial invited speakers:
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Saturday, July 18th
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM EDT: Keynote 1
- What does it mean to say a discourse relation is 'implicit'?
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh)
9:00 AM - 9:15 AM EDT: Short break
9:15 AM - 11:15 AM EDT: Talks Session 1
- Discourse Coherence, Reference Grounding and Goal Oriented Dialogue
Baber Khalid, Malihe Alikhani, Michael Fellner, Brian McMahan and Matthew Stone
- Investigating the Semantic Wave in Tutorial Dialogues: An Annotation Scheme and Corpus Study on Analogy Components
Jorge Del-Bosque-Trevino, Julian Hough and Matthew Purver
- Let's do that first! A Comparative Analysis of Instruction-Giving in Human-Human and Human-Robot Situated Dialogue
Matthew Marge, Felix Gervits, Gordon Briggs, Matthias Scheutz and Antonio Roque
- Pro-Active Systems and Influenceable Users: Simulating Pro-Activity in Task-oriented Dialogues
Vevake Balaraman and Bernardo Magnini
11:15 AM - 12:00 PM EDT: Lunch
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT: Talks Session 2
- On Laughter and Forgetting and Reconversing: A Neurologically-Inspired Model of Conversational Context
Jonathan Ginzburg and Andy Lücking
- Different Games in Dialogue: Combining Character and Conversational Types in Strategic Choice
Alafate Abulimiti
- An Outline of a Model of Situated Discourse Representation and Processing
David Schlangen
- Semantics with Feeling: Emotions for Abstract Embedding, Affect for Concrete Grounding
Daniele Moro, Gerardo Caracas, David McNeill and Casey Kennington
2:00 PM - 2:25 PM EDT: Short break
2:25 PM - 3:25 PM EDT: Talks Session 3
- Overcoming Distances -- The Usage of Calling Contours to Initiate Dialogues
Jakob Maché
- Comparing Models of Speakers' and Listeners' Head Nods
Tom Gurion, Patrick Healey and Julian Hough
3:25 PM - 3:40 PM EDT: Short break
3:40 PM - 4:40 PM EDT: Keynote 2
- Where to next? Situated Dialogue with Robots for Search and Navigation
Claire Bonial, Stephanie Lukin, Clare Voss (U.S. Army Research Laboratory)
4:40 PM EDT - Late: Virtual hangout
Sunday, July 19th
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT: Talks Session 4
- Commitments in German Tag Questions: An Experimental Study
Yulia Clausen and Tatjana Scheffler
- The Contribution of Dialogue Act Labels for Convergence Studies in Natural Conversations
Simone Fuscone, Benoit Favre and Laurent Prévot
- Towards the Score of Communication
Andy Lücking and Jonathan Ginzburg
- Classification of Low-Agreement Pronouns Through Collaborative Dialogue: A Proof of Concept
Janosch Haber and Massimo Poesio
10:00 AM - 10:15 AM EDT: Short break
10:15 AM - 12:15 AM EDT: Talks Session 5
- Communicable Reasons: How Children Learn Topoi Through Dialogue
Ellen Breitholtz and Christine Howes
- Extensions Are Indeterminate if Intensions Are Classifiers
Staffan Larsson
- There Is As Yet Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer
Maria Boritchev and Maxime Amblard
- Dialogue Informing Syntax/Semantics: The Case of Afterthoughts
Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
12:15 AM - 1:15 PM EDT: Lunch / Business Meeting
1:15 PM - 2:15 PM EDT: Talks Session 6
- Affordance Competition in Dialogue: The Case of Syntactic Universals
Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Arash Eshghi, Julian Hough, Christine Howes, Ruth Kempson, Jieun Kiaer, Matthew Purver, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh and Graham White
- A Multi-level Framework for Understanding Spoken Dialogue Using Topic Detection
Andrew Valenti, Ravenna Thielstrom, Michael Gold, Felix Gervits and Matthias Scheutz
- How to Say Things with Hand Gestures
Sandy Ciroux
2:15 PM - 2:40 PM EDT: Short break
2:40 PM - 4:25 PM EDT: Demos and Breaking News Talks
- Towards Situation- and User-Adaptive Voice Output: Classifying Driver Personality in Context
Daniela Stier, Wolfgang Minker, Ulrich Heid
- A Corpus of Swedish Conversations with a Librarian
Magdalena Sandahl, Simon Dobnik, Mehdi Ghanimifard
- Detecting Urgency in Speech with Personalised Acoustic Features
Jakob Landesberger, Ute Ehrlich
- Topic Modelling for a Virtual Librarian Assistant Tool
Linnea Strand, Robert Rhys Thomas, Simon Dobnik, Mehdi Ghanimifard
- A Statistical and Machine Learning Investigation into the Effect of Demographic Context on Dialogue Phenomena
David Hopes, Julian Hough
- LDM: A Linear Dialogue Manager
Vladislav Maraev, Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Jonathan Ginzburg
- From Answer to Question: Coherence Analysis with Rezonator
John W. DuBois, Terry DuBois, Georgio Klironomos, Brady Moore
4:25 PM - 4:40 PM EDT: Short break
4:40 PM - 5:40 PM EDT: Keynote 3
- Perspective and Indexicality: A NeoLocalist approach
Craige Roberts (Ohio State University and Rutgers University)
5:40 PM EDT - Late: Virtual hangout
The organizing effort is lead by the Brandeis interdisciplinary programs in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, in collaboration with the departments of Computer Science and Philosophy.
We hope to hold the next NASSLLI in the summer of 2021 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (in the Boston area).
The summer school has been providing outstanding interdisciplinary educational opportunities to graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the fields of Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Logic, Philosophy, and other related areas. NASSLLI brings these disciplines together with the goal of producing excellence in the study of how minds and machines represent, communicate, manipulate and reason with information.
NASSLLI represents a community which recognizes that advances in modeling and analyzing the performance of these tasks, as well as automating them, requires the contributions of multiple interrelated disciplines. NASSLLI provides a venue where students and researchers from one domain can learn approaches, frameworks and tools from related disciplines to apply to their own work. Courses offered at NASSLLI range from intensive, graduate level introductory courses to interdisciplinary workshops featuring prominent researchers presenting their work in progress.
NASSLLI will consist of a series of courses and workshops. In addition, there will be intensive training in a small set of topics, ranging from foundational to advanced. The NASSLLI @ Brandeis will also have a theme - Formal and Computational Pragmatics and Models of Dialogue.