Blog CRC1646

SemDial returned to Bielefeld after 24 years. The CRC 1646, together with the TRR 318 “Constructing Explainability” and the Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), hosted the 29th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, which took place from 3rd to 5th September 2025. Under the theme "Meaningful Interaction", SemDial 2025 had a special focus on empirical, theoretical, and computational work that investigates the prerequisites for meaningful interaction, such as cognitive mechanisms, computational representations, but also human users’ attitudes or ethical considerations.

The PIs Hendrik Buschmeier (B02, INF), Stefan Kopp (C02), Sina Zarrieß (A05, B02) und the Postdoctoral Fellow Maryam Mohammadi (INF) were part of the local organising committee. The three-day workshop consisted of three keynotes, five sessions with presentations and two with posters. The keynotes were given by Arabella Sinclair (University of Aberdeen) on “The Many Reasons for Repetition in Dialogue”, Robert D. Hawkins (Stanford University) on “Foraging for Common Ground” and – invited by the CRC – David Schlangen (Potsdam University und CRC 1287) on “Meaningful Interaction with Unreal Speakers”.

Contributions from the CRC:

Leonie Schade presented experimental work from the A02 project on the production of novel phonetic forms and the innovative methodology to assess them. In her talk “Does it take two to do an articulatory tango? Investigating the production of novel phonetic forms in varying communicative settings” co-authored with Daniel Duran, Sina Zarrieß, Joana Cholin and Petra Wagner, she discussed how speech dynamics depend on the communicative setting, social context and individual differences in speakers’ personality.

Bastian Bunzeck from the A02 project presented a poster entitled “Child-Directed Speech Is Fine-Tuned to Children’s Developmental Needs” based on earlier work in collaboration with Holger Diessel (FSU Jena). Crucially, their work highlights the importance of the communicative setting and how it affects variation in situated interaction. Their data neatly “show that the relative frequency of the different CDS constructions varies with the social situation and children’s age”.

Shravani Patil from the project A03 presented two posters on the particle ‘-hii’ in Hindi based on her joint work with Farhat Jabeen. The first was entitled “One -hii to rule them all: Functions and intonation of particle -hii in Hindi movie dialogues“. Here they present a movie corpus for the analysis of ‘-hii‘ and propose that this particle, despite having several context-dependent interpretations, has a single lexical entry: contrast. The second was entitled „Intonation and prosodic phrasing of particle ‘-hii’ in Hindi/Urdu dialogues” and showed the first evidence of variability in the attachment of ‘-hii’ in a nominal phrase. René Nicolas and Arndt Riester (B03) presented their work on response strategies of politicians in interview settings with a special interest in evasive strategies. In her joint Poster entitled “Towards a discourse-structure based response classification for interviews” they proposed a response classification and showed some examples of the different categories taken from a corpus of QUD-annotated interviews.

Finally, Sina Zarrieß (A05, B02) contributed to a Poster by her research fellows Judith Sieker and Clara Lachenmaier entitled “The FLEX benchmark: Evaluating pragmatic competence in LLMs via false presuppositions”, in which they highlight critical limitations in current LL.Ms’ ability, especially regarding grounding behaviour and the influence of context and political orientation.

For the CRC 1646 Participants of the SemDial 2025 “Bialogue” was a great success. The stimulating discussions on topics relating to the communication of meaning in an interactive dialogue between humans and machines helped to advance the projects.

Leonie Schade (A02)                                                                                  on the right side Bastian Bunzeck (A02)

on the right side Shravani Patil (A03)                                                                           René Nicolas (B03)

all © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646