Recent advances in theoretical, computational, and applied linguistics demonstrate a need to integrate information across all the individual linguistic modules that are involved in the comprehension of spoken discourse. To facilitate this integration, a workshop on the Grammatical Foundations of Prosody and Discourse will be held between June 23rd and July 7th, 1991, at the University of California at Santa Cruz, during the first two weeks of the Summer Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America and co-sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The workshop, which will culminate in a short conference, will bring together internationally known researchers, both from academia and industry, who work at the interfaces between linguistic specializations. It will provide the opportunity for researchers in speech processing, phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse to work together to develop a common understanding of crucial theoretical, descriptive, and computational issues in spoken language understanding across their subject areas. An important task for the two week long meeting will be to explore how information expressed in one module of the grammar, syntactic structure for example, can best be organized to convey all the information needed by other related modules, such as discourse and prosody. Such an exploration is needed for the development of more robust computational systems for natural language understanding, translation, and generation, as well as being directly applicable to speech understanding and synthesis technology. Holding the meeting at the Linguistic Institute and encouraging participation by Institute attendees at many of the workshop functions as well as at the public conference will assure that the concerns to be addressed will be disseminated among the linguistic community at large.
