3 February 2026, PhD Defense, Valentin Richard

To celebrate the PhD defense of Valentin D. Richard, we would like to gather colleagues working on related topics. With this workshop, we aim to gain a broader picture of how a sentence contributes to a discourse. The meaning of a sentence cannot be derived on its own. Together, sentences form larger discourse units, structuring the information flow. Questions are a fundamental part of human dialogues. Moreover, many illocutionary acts also rely on implicit questions, the so-called Questions under Discussion (QuD). Therefore, understanding how questions help construct a conversation is essential.

This workshop welcomes talks on novel or promising proposals regarding information structure, inference generation, and the modeling of natural language meaning. The boundary between semantics and pragmatics remains a hotly debated topic. When designing a natural language model, what building blocks and principles should we use to explain context-dependent phenomena, especially background inferences? We hope that this gathering can yield interesting insights into questions and the discourse.