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This paper introduces a novel &#39;universal&#39; approach to discourse annotation, serving as a comprehensive synthesis of the ISO 24617-8 semantic annotation framework and a newly developed multi-layer model of coherence relations. To address the complexities of text analysis, we present a hierarchical classification and a systematic decision tree. By unifying disparate formalisms, our model provides researchers with a robust, standardised methodology for analysing complex discourse structures across various linguistic contexts.

ACL 2026

Universal Discourse Relations: A Proposal

discourse relations

annotation

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

This paper introduces a novel 'universal' approach to discourse annotation, serving as a comprehensive synthesis of the ISO 24617-8 semantic annotation framework and a newly developed multi-layer model of coherence relations. To address the complexities of text analysis, we present a hierarchical classification and a systematic decision tree. By unifying disparate formalisms, our model provides researchers with a robust, standardised methodology for analysing complex discourse structures across various linguistic contexts.

workshop paper

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

This abstract describes a work-in-progress study of conversation-level effects on in-context word meaning. The abstract describes a definition modeling-based metric for lexical semantic conversational contingency and presents the results of a pilot study using the Fora corpus.

Investigating discourse-level lexical semantic adaptation: A definition modeling approach

In this work, we propose a method for dialog simulation to gather high-quality open-domain, multi-turn question answering conversations. The simulation is grounded on Stack Exchange posts and motivated by computational discourse theory. We first convert forum posts into structured directed graphs; then, different traversals through the graph represent possible conversational trajectories. Our proposed graph traversal algorithm produces dialogs optimized for conversational efficiency. In addition, we propose an evaluation framework based on Gricean conversational maxims. Expert-level human annotators evaluate transcripts according to our framework; dialogs produced by our method receive ratings that are competitive with dialogs from prior work.

A First Step towards Dialog Simulation with Grounded Dialog Graphs

This extended abstract presents a Rational Speech-Act model predicting the persuasiveness ("argument strength") of explanations, as well as preliminary experimental data that validates the predictions of the model. While first-order Bayesian models developed by psychologists of reasoning generally predict that arguments become stronger when more reasons are provided, we investigate the competing intuition that excess reasons can weaken an argument ("the lady doth protest too much!"). We account for this effect by drawing upon a growing body of literature which shows that listeners make pragmatic inferences to rationalize violations of their "informativity expectations".

The lady doth protest too much: discourse expectations affect judgments of argument strength

We present semantic-pragmatic specification and annotation (ellipsis, coreference, bridging and discourse relations, information structure, scope of negation) in the multi-layer, genre-diversified, 3+ million-token Enriched PDT. While morphology and syntax work almost exclusively on sentence level, the semantic-pragmatic phenomena are often related to two or more neighbouring sentences and possibly to an extra-linguistic context. In the contribution, we describe these phenomena from both the linguistic perspective (form of expression, relation to syntax and morphology) and the cognitive perspective (relation to context, real world knowledge, as well as to the related processes such as thinking or reasoning) – classifying the possible relations between the semantic-pragmatic units into cognitively plausible, distinguishable, and human-understandable categories. We have applied our results to the corpus, by annotating it in its entirety. The resulting Enriched PDT is publicly and freely available, to serve for verification and further investigation of (not only) these phenomena.

Semantic-pragmatic Annotations in the Prague Dependency Treebank

Errors in automatic coreference resolution can be traced back to errors in mention detection and coreference linking. In this paper, we analyse the errors in mention detection produced by the coreference resolver CorPipe (Straka 2023). In particular, we evaluate the performance on different variants of German (written, spoken, original, and simplified). We discuss the errors against the background of the fact that the tool was trained on a combination of different coreference corpora, including two German datasets with partially conflicting annotation guidelines. The results indicate that simplification has a significant effect on mention detection independent of the modality.

Errors in coreference resolution in German: Effects of modality, simplification and heterogeneous training data

We introduce BeDiscovER (Benchmark of Discourse Understanding in the Era of Reasoning Language Models), an up-to-date, comprehensive suite for evaluating the discourse-level knowledge of modern LLMs. BeDiscovER compiles 5 publicly available discourse tasks across discourse lexicon, (multi-)sentential, and documental levels, with in total 52 individual datasets. It covers both extensively studied tasks such as discourse parsing and temporal relation extraction, as well as some novel challenges such as discourse particle disambiguation (e.g., “just”), and also aggregates a shared-task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Tree-banking for multilingual and multi-framework discourse relation classification. We evaluate open-source LLMs: Qwen3 series, DeepSeek-R1, and frontier reasoning model GPT-5-mini on BeDiscovER, and find that state-of-the-art models exhibits strong performance in arithmetic aspect of temporal reasoning, but they struggle with long-dependency reasoning and some subtle semantic and discourse phenomena, such as rhetorical relation classification.

BeDiscovER: The Benchmark of Discourse Understanding in the Era of Reasoning Language Models

This paper describes our multilingual coreference system developed for the CRAC 2026 unconstrained track. We introduce a unified, single-model architecture based on Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) that supports 20 languages. Notably, our approach achieves multilingual resolution without the use of large language models (LLMs) or pretrained weights. In contrast to resource-intensive neural methods, the proposed model is efficient, and suitable for deployment on standard hardware (CPUs). It uses linguistic and contextual features to capture coreference relations across languages with diverse syntactic and morphological properties. Model training was conducted using the official data distributions released for the CRAC 2026 shared task. This methodology provides a robust, scalable solution for multilingual NLP, demonstrating high utility within resource-constrained environments. The results highlight that feature-driven structured models remain effective for complex cross-lingual tasks. The performance on test data is similar to the results obtained for the development data.

Lightweight Multilingual Coreference Resolution without LLMs @CRAC2026

This paper presents Landcore (LANguage-Dependent COference REsolution), our submission to the LLM Track of the CRAC 2026 Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution. We explore the capabilities of LLMs in coreference resolution across multiple languages and domains, using a~few-shot prompting approach. We design a~comprehensive prompt that includes detailed instructions and examples and further enhance it using an LLM to produce language-specific prompts. We present an EML annotation scheme that is more suitable for LLMs than the provided formats. Although our solution is not the best-performing, we show that our ideas improve performance across various settings.

Landcore: Coreference Resolution with Language-Specific LLM-Enhanced Prompts and XML-Inspired Annotation Scheme

Participating again in this year's edition of the CRAC shared task on coreference resolution, we present our upgraded system with an official uplift of 15.46 percentage points in CoNLL-U score. We incorporate the larger Gemma 3 27B IT model, joint pre-training, headword tagging, more efficient training and inference as well as a sliding window to achieve this result. Our system placed second in the LLM track and third overall with a primary score of 73.83. We achieved the highest scores on two datasets. Finally, we compare specialized and general LLM approaches.

Generative Multilingual Coreference Resolution at CRAC 2026

We present DAggerCoref, our submission to
the CRAC 2026 Shared Task on Multilingual
Coreference Resolution. DAggerCoref is a
three-stage cascade built on XLM-RoBERTa-
large: a gap classifier for zero pronoun detec-
tion, a mention head classifier, and a coarse-
to-fine antecedent scorer. Our central contri-
bution is applying DAgger (Ross et al., 2011)
to coreference resolution: after training the
antecedent scorer on gold mentions, we fine-
tune on a 50/50 mix of gold and pipeline-
predicted mentions, closing the train/test dis-
tribution mismatch and improving develop-
ment set macro CoNLL F1 by 1.10 points. We
also introduce Otsu adaptive thresholding for
zero pronoun detection, which matches gold-
tuned per-dataset thresholds without requiring
any gold supervision. Our system achieves a
macro CoNLL F1 of 67.56 on the official test
set across 27 datasets and 19 languages

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Investigating discourse-level lexical semantic adaptation: A definition modeling approach

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Learning Label Embeddings for Mapping Discourse Relations of Different Annotation Frameworks (Extended Abstract)

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Next from ACL 2026

Investigating discourse-level lexical semantic adaptation: A definition modeling approach

Similar lecture

Learning Label Embeddings for Mapping Discourse Relations of Different Annotation Frameworks (Extended Abstract)

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

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COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads