Dieses Bild zeigt Arndt Riester

Arndt Riester

Herr Dr. phil.

Kontakt

Fachgebiet

I am a linguist and senior researcher in formal semantics and pragmatics. My main area of interest is information structure (and its effects on prosody and morphosyntax) but I am also interested in other means of discourse structuring, such as tense and aspect. My main goal is to test semantic hypotheses on written and spoken corpus data. Finally, I also develop pragmatic annotation schemata and contribute to computational linguistic applications that depend on an understanding of discourse.

Most recent

  • Arndt Riester (in press). Constructing QUD trees. In Malte Zimmermann, Klaus von Heusinger and Edgar Onea (eds.) Questions in Discourse. Vol. 2: Pragmatics. Leiden: Brill.
  • Anja Latrouite and Arndt Riester (2018). The role of information structure for morphosyntactic choices in Tagalog. In Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara and Atsuko Utsumi (eds.) Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages. Berlin: Language Science Press, pp. 247-284.
  • Arndt Riester and Asako Shiohara (2018). Information structure in Sumbawa: A QUD analysis. In Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara and Atsuko Utsumi (eds.) Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages. Berlin: Language Science Press, pp. 285-311.
  • Ina Rösiger, Arndt Riester and Jonas Kuhn (2018). Bridging resolution: Task definition, corpus resources and rule-based experiments. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Santa Fe, NM, US, pp. 3516-3528.
  • Arndt Riester, Lisa Brunetti and Kordula De Kuthy (2018). Annotation guidelines for Questions under Discussion and information structure. In Evangelia Adamou, Katharina Haude and Martine Vanhove (eds.) Information Structure in Lesser-Described Languages: Studies in Syntax and Prosody. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 403-443.
  • Kordula De Kuthy, Nils Reiter and Arndt Riester (2018). QUD-based annotation of discourse structure and information structure: Tool and evaluation. In Nicoletta Calzolari et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Miyazaki, JP, pp. 1932-1938.
  • Katrin Schweitzer, Kerstin Eckart, Markus Gärtner, Agnieszka Faleńska, Arndt Riester, Ina Rösiger, Antje Schweitzer, Sabrina Stehwien and Jonas Kuhn (2018). German radio interviews: The GRAIN release of the SFB732 Silver Standard Collection. In Nicoletta Calzolari et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Miyazaki, JP, pp. 2887-2895.

Selected publications

Journal articles
  • Arndt Riester and Jörn Piontek (2015). Anarchy in the NP. When new nouns get deaccented and given nouns don't. Lingua 165(B): 230-253.
  • Stefan Baumann and Arndt Riester (2013). Coreference, lexical givenness and prosody in German. Lingua 136: 16-37.
  • Arndt Riester and Stefan Baumann (2013). Focus triggers and focus types from a corpus perspective. Dialogue and Discourse 4(2): 215-248.
Book chapters
  • Stefan Baumann and Arndt Riester (2012). Referential and lexical givenness: Semantic, prosodic and cognitive aspects. In Gorka Elordieta and Pilar Prieto (eds.) Prosody and Meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 119-161.
  • Kerstin Eckart, Arndt Riester and Katrin Schweitzer (2012). A Discourse Information Radio News Database for Linguistic Analysis. In Christian Chiarcos, Sebastian Nordhoff and Sebastian Hellmann (eds.) Linked Data in Linguistics. Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 65-75.
Major conferences
  • Uwe Reyle and Arndt Riester (2016). Joint information structure and discourse structure analysis in an Underspecified DRT framework. In Julie Hunter, Mandy Simons and Matthew Stone (eds.) Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial/JerSem), New Brunswick, NJ, US, pp. 15-24.
  • Ina Rösiger and Arndt Riester (2015). Using prosodic annotations to improve coreference resolution of spoken text. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP), Beijing, pp. 83-88.
  • Aoife Cahill and Arndt Riester (2012). Automatically acquiring fine-grained information status distinctions in German. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial), Seoul, pp. 232-236.
  • Arndt Riester and Hans Kamp (2010). Squiggly issues: Alternative sets, complex DPs, and intensionality. In Maria Aloni, Harald Bastiaanse, Tikitu de Jager and Katrin Schulz (eds.) Logic, Language and Meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2009, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin: Springer, pp. 374-383.
  • Stefan Baumann and Arndt Riester (2010). Annotating information status in spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Speech Prosody, Chicago, Vol. 100092, pp. 1-4.
  • Aoife Cahill and Arndt Riester (2009). Incorporating information status into generation ranking. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Assocation for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP), Singapore, pp. 817-825.
  • Arndt Riester (2008). A semantic explication of Information Status and the underspecification of the recipients' knowledge. In Atle Grønn (ed.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, Oslo, pp. 508-522.
  • Arndt Riester (2006). Only scalar. In Janneke Huitink and Sophia Katrenko (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th ESSLLI Student Session, Málaga, pp. 64-75.
  • Arndt Riester (2005). Context and focus projection. A compositional intonation-based account of focus interpretation. In Emar Maier, Corien Bary and Janneke Huitink (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9, Nijmegen, NL, pp. 299-313.
Other
  • Arndt Riester and Stefan Baumann (2017). The RefLex Scheme – Annotation Guidelines. Vol. 14 of SinSpeC. Working Papers of the SFB 732. Universität Stuttgart.
  • Anders Björkelund, Kerstin Eckart, Arndt Riester, Nadja Schauffler and Katrin Schweitzer (2014). The extended DIRNDL corpus as a resource for coreference and bridging resolution. In Nicoletta Calzolari et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Reykjavík, pp. 3222-3228.
  • Arndt Riester, David Lorenz and Nina Seemann (2010). A recursive annotation scheme for referential information status. In Nicoletta Calzolari et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Valletta, Malta, pp. 717-722.
  • Arndt Riester (2009). Stress test for relative clauses. In Edgar Onea and Arndt Riester (eds.) Focus at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Vol. 3 of SinSpeC. Working Papers of the SFB 732. Universität Stuttgart, pp.69-86.

Everything

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Linguistik / Anglistik

  • SoSe 2018. Advanced Linguistics (MA level)

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung

  • WiSe 2017/18. Co-Reference Resolution (MA level) (mit Ina Rösiger)
  • SoSe 2016. Co-Reference Resolution (MA level) (mit Ina Rösiger)
  • SoSe 2008. Semantik III (mit Hans Kamp)
  • SoSe 2007. Informationsstruktur
  • SoSe 2006. Informationsstruktur
  • SoSe 2005. Informationsstruktur (mit Hans Kamp)
  • WiSe 2004/05. Übungen zu Logik und formale Grundlagen II

26th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

  • Annotating Corpora with Information Structure (jointly with Kordula De Kuthy)

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Linguistik / Germanistik

  • SoSe 2015. Pragmatik II (BA level)
  • SoSe 2014. Semantik und Pragmatik von Fragen und Aussagen (MA level) (mit Uwe Reyle)
  • SoSe 2013. Semantik II: Diskursrepräsentationstheorie, Tempus und Aspekt (BA Level)
  • WiSe 2010/11. Pragmatik I (BA Level)
  • WiSe 2008/09. Informationsstruktur zwischen Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik (mit Kirsten Gengel und Edgar Onea)
  • WiSe 2003/04. Tutorium zu Intonation und Informationsstruktur

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Seminar für Englische Philologie (SoSe 2012)

  • Introduction to Semantic Theory (BA Level)
  • Semantics Lab Class (BA Level)
  • Tense and Aspect (BA Level)
  • Information Structure (MA Level)

since 07/2006

Senior Researcher

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Sonderforschungsbereich 732 Incremental Specification in Context

Project A6 Encoding of Information Structure in German and French (since 2014)

Project A1 Incremental Specification of Focus and Givenness in a Discourse Context (2006--2014)

 
 

02/2017 - 05/2017

Visiting Associate Professor

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (東京外国語大学), Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa

 
 

04/2012 - 09/2012

Interim Professor

Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Department of English Language and Literature
Chair of Linguistics (Semantics / Pragmatics)

 
 

01/2008

Doctoral Dissertation in Computational Linguistics / Formal Semantics

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Thesis: The Components of Focus and their Use in Annotating Information Structure (Adviser: Hans Kamp)

 
 

05/2005 - 06/2006

PhD Scholarship

Universität Stuttgart, Graduate School 609 Linguistic Representations and their Interpretation

 
 

01/2002 - 04/2005

Researcher

Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Project: Logic-Based Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

 
 

09/1998 - 07/2001

MA in Linguistics

Universiteit van Amsterdam -- Department of Linguistics, and Institute of Logic, Language and Computation
Thesis: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on Attributive Possession

 
 

10/1996 - 07/1998

Undergraduate in Linguistics, Computer Science and Psychology

Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

 
 

10/1994 - 02/1997

Undergraduate in Computer Science and Business Studies (Vordiplom)

Universität Ulm

Research project A6. Encoding of Information Structure in German and French. SFB 732

My field of research is the information structure of natural language. Sentences aren't standardised "information bricks" from which texts or speeches can be built. Rather, sentences are like puzzle pieces; often there is only one that fits. The same information can be presented in numerous ways, and in fact, the mode of presentation depends on various external factors: most importantly, on what was said or written just before the utterance in question but also, which people or objects are present, or influence us, while we communicate, and what knowledge we, as considerate speakers, ascribe to our interlocutors.

All these contextual factors have an influence on the way in which we are going to say (form) what we want to say (content). To refer to a certain person, we might use a pronoun, call them by their name, or provide an elaborate circumscription. To make an utterance "sound right", it is necessary that the order (and, therefore, prominence) of the phrases that we are planning to use is somehow adapted to the properties of the preceding (and sometimes subsequent) text or utterance; and finally, it is clear that using proper intonation is not a matter of individual style but can actually influence whether we are being understood or not. (Also think of writing a message and suddenly feeling the urge to underline or capitalize a certain word!)

All this pertains to what linguists call information structure. It is usually described in terms of whether certain words or expressions represent new or given or inferred information, whether two phrases stand in a contrastive relation to each other, whether they are the current topic or the focus of an assertion. Doing research on information structure can also mean to uncover the strategy that the author of a text followed in order to get a complex message across and, therefore, ultimately, to unveil the structure of discourse. If you want to know more about all that, you are welcome to read my papers!

An article in Stuttgarter Zeitung (in German) about my (and my colleagues') work

Invited talks Other talks (selection)

When Data Challenges Theory: Non-Prototypical, Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in the Field of Information Structure
Universität Freiburg
February 15, 2019
t.b.a.

Referential Expressions in Discourse (RED 7) – The Grammar of Reference and Quantification: Functions, Variation, and Change
Università di Bologna, IT
June 15, 2017
(Invited discussant)

Universität zu Köln, Institut für Linguistik/Phonetik
Hauptseminar Annotation von Informationsstruktur und Intonation
December 16, 2016
Annotationspraxis RefLex-System und QUDs

Workshop on the Interface of Prosody and Information Structure
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
June 17, 2016
Principles of information-structure analysis

Third International Workshop on Information Structure of Austronesian Languages
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
February 18, 2016
Information-structure analysis of spoken discourse

Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft
November 5, 2015
Questions under Discussion in spoken interview data

Second International Workshop on Information Structure of Austronesian Languages
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
February 11, 2015
Annotating corpus data with information structure: An example from Balinese

Université Diderot, Paris 7
December 16, 2014
Analysis of discourse structure and information structure using Questions under Discussion

Universität Potsdam, Department für Linguistik
October 28, 2013
Marking Relative Givenness

Kickoff Workshop VisArgue – Analyzing Political Argumentation
Universität Konstanz
October 1, 2013
Where's the information? Analysis of a spoken news item

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Linguistik
Kolloquium der Forschergruppe 1783 "Relativsätze"
June 25, 2013
Information-structural properties of relative clauses

Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora (ISSLaC)
Universität Bielefeld
June 10, 2013
Keynote Speech: Room for interpretation: Information-structural variation in read text

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Phonetik
Kolloquium
May 13, 2013
Marking Relative Givenness

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Oberseminar Neuere Literatur zu Syntax und Semantik
December 17, 2012
Focus triggers and focus types

Workshop on Semantic and Pragmatic Annotation of Corpora
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
July 16, 2012
Information-structural categories in corpus annotation

Workshop Deutsche Intonation: Annotation und Modellierung (DIMA-1)
Universität zu Köln
September 10, 2011
Intonation und Semantik/Pragmatik

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Oberseminar Current Research in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning
July 1, 2011
The RefLex Scheme

Graz Workshop on Information Structure (GWIS)
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
June 17, 2011
Referential information status, prosody and syntax in German radio news

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Englisches Seminar
Oberseminar Freezing
June 7, 2011
Prosody and discourse: annotating and harvesting a corpus resource

Workshop on Discourse Semantics and Pragmatics
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
December 17, 2010
From discourse semantics to corpus annotation and back

Universitetet i Oslo, Institutt for filosofi, idé- og kunsthistorie og klassiske språk
Theoretical Linguistics Seminar
May 27, 2009
Annotating information structure: Practical and theoretical aspects

Universität zu Köln, Institut für Linguistik/Phonetik
Forschungskolloquium Phonetik
July 13, 2008
Towards Annotating Focus

Georg-August-Universität, Seminar für Englische Philologie
Seminar Syntax and Semantics of Focus
May 13, 2008
Givenness, information status and focus in corpus data

Universität Potsdam, Department Linguistik
Gastvortragsreihe des Sonderforschungsbereichs 632 "Informationsstruktur"
June 19, 2007
(mit Katrin Schweitzer) Incremental specification of focus and givenness

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Forschungsseminar des Projekts Typologie und Logische Form der Satznegation, Sonderforschungsbereich 443
February 2006
Only scalar

Workshop on the Role of Prosody in Structuring Discourse
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
May 10, 2005
Semantic clues for reconstructing information structure from text

27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
Santa Fe Community Convention Center, NM, US
August 20, 2018
(with Ina Rösiger and Jonas Kuhn) Poster: Bridging resolution: Task definition, corpus resources and rule-based experiments

Eleventh Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)
Phoenix Seagaia Conference Center, Miyazaki, JP
May 7-12, 2018

  • (with Kordula De Kuthy and Nils Reiter) Poster: QUD-based annotation of discourse structure and information structure
  • (with Katrin Schweitzer, Kerstin Eckart, Markus Gärtner, Agnieszka Falenska, Ina Rösiger, Antje Schweitzer, Sabrina Stehwien and Jonas Kuhn) Poster: German radio interviews: The GRAIN release of the SFB732 Silver Standard Collection

40th Annual Meeting of the DGfS
Workshop on the relation between prosodic and referential structure
Universität Stuttgart
March 7, 2018
(with Kerstin Eckart, Ina Rösiger, Antje Schweitzer, Katrin Schweitzer and Sabrina Stehwien) Studying the prosodic properties of referring expressions in corpus resources: Obstacles and state of the art

SFB 732 Final Colloquium
Universität Stuttgart
March 6, 2018
Annotation of Questions under Discussion (QUDs) and its applications

Workshop on Prosody and Meaning
Universität Konstanz
October 5, 2017
(with Cristel Portes and Uwe Reyle) How does French mark focus and givenness? A corpus study in a QUD approach

Workshop on Discourse, Information Structure and Prosody in Corpora
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, FR
June 27, 2017
Transforming written or spoken discourse into QUD trees

Workshop on Questions under Discussion in Austronesian Languages
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
May 27, 2017
What QUDs can tell us about the information structure of Sumbawa

Non-At-Issue Meaning and Information Structure (XPrag Workshop)
Universitetet i Oslo
May 9, 2017
(with Lisa Brunetti and Kordula De Kuthy) A QUD-based analysis of non-at-issue material in corpus data

20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (JerSem)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
July 17, 2016
(with Uwe Reyle) Joint information structure and discourse structure analysis in an Underspecified DRT framework

53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP).
Beijing
July 26, 2015
(with Ina Rösiger) Using prosodic annotations to improve coreference resolution of spoken text

7th Meeting of the DFG Network on Questions in Discourse
Georg-August Universität Göttingen
June 25, 2015
QUD trees and d-accessibility

Workshop on Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on the Interrelation of Syntax, Semantics and Prosody
Universität zu Köln
December 2, 2014
Analysis of discourse structure and information structure using Questions under Discussion

Ninth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)
Reykjavik
May 26, 2014
(with Anders Björkelund, Kerstin Eckart, Nadja Schauffler and Katrin Schweitzer) Poster: The extended DIRNDL corpus as a resource for coreference and bridging resolution

Second Graz Workshop on Information Structure (GWIS)
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, AT
March 24, 2013
(with Jörn Piontek) Relative Givenness in German adjectival modification

35th Annual Meeting of the DGfS
Workshop Prosody and Information Status in Typological Perspective
Universität Potsdam
March 13, 2013
(with Moritz Stiefel and Kerstin Eckart) Investigating focus projection in corpus data

13th Annual SIGDial Meeting on Discourse and Dialog
Seoul National University
July 5, 2012
(with Aoife Cahill) Poster: Automatically acquiring fine-grained information-status distinctions in German

34th Annual Meeting of the DGfS
Workshop Linked Data in Linguistics
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
March 9, 2012
(with Kerstin Eckart and Katrin Schweitzer) A Discourse Information Radio News Database for Linguistic Analysis

Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP 2)
McGill University, Montréal
September 23-25, 2011

  • (with Kerstin Eckart and Katrin Schweitzer) The prosody of short referring expressions in German radio news
  • (with Petra Augurzky, Kerstin Eckart, Gerhard Jäger and Katrin Schweitzer) Poster: Effects of transitivity and discourse context on prosodic phrasing in German

Prosody-Discourse Interface (IDP 2011)
University of Salford, UK
September 12, 2011
Pitch accents on short referential expressions in German radio news

33rd Annual Meeting of the DGfS
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
February 23-25 2011

  • Workshop Beyond Semantics: Corpus-Based Investigations of Pragmatic and Discourse Phenomena
    (with Stefan Baumann) Information-structure annotation and secondary accents
  • DGfS Sektion Computerlinguistik, Poster Session
    (with Kerstin Eckart, Katrin Schweitzer and Nina Seemann) Querying information-status and prosody annotations: the problem of deviating primary data

Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics VII
Campus Innovation Center, Tokyo
November 18, 2010
Restriction triggers alternative presuppositions

7th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)
Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, Malta
May 17, 2010
(with David Lorenz and Nina Seemann) A recursive annotation scheme for Referential Information Status

5th International Conference on Speech Prosody
Chicago
May 11, 2010
(with Stefan Baumann) Poster: Annotating information status in spontaneous speech

17th Amsterdam Colloquium
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
December 16, 2009
(with Hans Kamp) Squiggly issues: Alternative sets, complex DPs and intensionality

47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP)
Suntec, Singapore
August 2, 2009
(with Aoife Cahill) Incorporating information status into generation ranking

31st Annual Meeting of the DGfS
Workshop Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
Universität Osnabrück
March 5, 2009
(with Stefan Baumann) (De-)Accentuation and coreference

18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL)
Information Structure Session
Korea University, Seoul
July 25, 2008
Partial accommodation and activation in definites

Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP 1)
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
April 11, 2008
(with Katrin Schweitzer) Poster: Phonological and acoustic specification of information status. A semantic and phonetic analysis

Sinn und Bedeutung XII
Universitetet i Oslo
September 22, 2007
A semantic explication of 'Information Status' and the underspecification of the recipients' knowledge

Workshop on Presupposition Accommodation
The Ohio State University, Columbus
October 14, 2006
Poster: Reversing the informational architecture of scalar particles

18th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
Student Session
Universidad de Málaga
August 7, 2006
Only scalar

Workshop on Formal Semantics 2
Lomonosov Moscow State University
April 15, 2006
A unified lexical entry for 'only'

Sinn und Bedeutung IX
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, NL
November 1, 2004
Context and focus projection. A compositional, intonation-based account of focus interpretation

 

 

Prosody and Information Structure in Stuttgart (PINS)
University of Stuttgart
March 22-23, 2016
Organised by Arndt Riester, Nadja Schauffler, Meg Zellers and Sabine Zerbian

Workshop on Universals in Focus, Background and Givenness Marking
University of Stuttgart
January 18-19, 2016
Organised by Daniel Hole and Arndt Riester

Workshop on Empirical and Theoretical Approaches to Questions in Discourse
(Fifth Meeting of the DFG Network Questions in Discourse)
University of Stuttgart
May 21-22, 2014
Organised by Arndt Riester, Edgar Onea and Malte Zimmermann

Workshop on Topic/Focus Annotation (RAIS 2)
Freie Universität Berlin
April 4, 2014
Organised by Philippa Cook, Manfred Stede and Arndt Riester

Rethinking (the Annotation of) Anaphora and Information Structure (RAIS)
Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart
March 23-24, 2013
Organised by Massimo Poesio and Arndt Riester

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