Based on their previous work, the two groups will exchange ideas on cross-corpora and cross-linguistic studies which will shed light on the general characteristics of the discourse regardless of a particular taxonomy of relation senses, i.e., via cognitive and empirical validation of relation sense categories. The overlap between the Saarland computational research on discourse relations and discourse markers and the psycholinguistic approach to the same problem in Prof. Sander’s group will shed new light on the question of what types of relations exist or would best explain human understanding of text coherence. The program will include an invited talk by Ms Torabi Asr and Dr Demberg at the Utrecht discourse colloquium, and detailed meetings with researchers working on relevant issues, such as the Swiss-Dutch project on discourse annotation, cross-linguistic comparison and translation, acquisition of discourse connectives, psycholinguistics of discourse, and eye-tracking.
