Blog CRC1646

The SemDial Workshop Series is an annual conference on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue. SemDial brings together researchers from a diverse range of disciplines, including theoretical linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The last edition took place in Bielefeld 2025 organized from the CRC 1646 together with the TRR 318 and the CITEC (see report). SemDial 2026 – LuffDial, the 30^th installment of the SemDial Series, was hosted at Loughborough University by the Discourse and Rhetoric Group from September 3-4. Alon Fishman (C02) and Florian Kankowski (Ö) attended the conference to present their respective research.

Florian Kankowski spoke in the session on formal approaches to discourse under the title “Pragmatic Reasoning in Reference Games Using Rational Speech Act Theory - A Computational Study Using the Game Codenames”, co-authored with Stefan Kopp (C02) and Amelie Robrecht-Hilbig (University of Gothenburg). In the talk, he presented a Bayesian model for decision-making and inference in the popular board game Codenames. He highlighted the formal aspects of the model and showed results from two experimental studies investigating the competence of the model in actual cooperative scenarios playing with human teammates.

In a second contribution, Florian gave a poster presentation entitled “Expecting to Chat? Towards Investigating the Discourse Behaviour of (Instruction-Tuned) Language Models”. He discussed the design of a large-scale comparative study on language use in humans and LLMs as part of the ongoing research on the discourse properties of LLMs by project Ö and in his dissertation project. In discussions during and after the poster session, attendees exchanged ideas about theory-guided approaches to analysing LLM discourse behaviour, giving Florian helpful feedback for his future research.

Alon Fishman gave a talk in the session on multimodality, titled “When words don’t come easy – How speakers cope with communicatively challenging situations using verbal creativity and co-speech gesture”. He presented results collected by project C02 in an interactive reference task, showing that speakers proactively invent new words and gesture with their hands to solve communication challenges. The audience in attendance had insightful questions and suggestions concerning further analyses of the experimental data.

see for the programme

 © SemDial2026

back row left to right: Hendrik Buschmeier (B02, INF), Julian Hough (Swansea University), Florian Kankowski (Ö), Helena Stahlschmidt (TRR 318, B07)

front row left to right: Amelie Robrecht-Hilbig (University of Gothenburg), Alon Fishman (C02)

© SFB 1646