Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives

Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives

We are pleased to announce the next edition of DETEC, a conference series dedicated to the study of expectation-driven discourse processing. Following successful previous instalments in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019, DETEC 2026 aims to bring the community back together to take stock of recent developments and explore new directions in the study of discourse expectations.

  • Where: Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • When: Thursday September 17 – Friday September 18 2026

(Note this is right before the XPrag.it conference held in Italy, September 24-25)

Topic:

A growing body of research shows that natural language interpretation is fundamentally predictive. Comprehenders continuously generate expectations about upcoming linguistic material using information from multiple sources, including lexical and morpho-syntactic cues, prosody, discourse structure, world knowledge, and communicative goals. These expectations shape processing at all levels, from reference resolution and coherence relations to pragmatic inference and conversational implicature.

DETEC 2026 provides a forum for interdisciplinary exchange between theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to discourse expectations. We invite contributions from linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, NLP, and related fields that address how expectations arise, how they can be measured and modeled, and how they interact with linguistic structure and extra-linguistic knowledge.

Invited speakers:

Paula Rubio-Fernandez (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

Matthew Husband (University of Oxford)

Important dates:

  • Deadline for abstract submission: May 11, 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: June 22, 2026

Organisers:

Funding:

This conference is financially supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the project “Searching for meaning: Identifying and interpreting alternative discourse relation signals in multi-modal language comprehension”, VI.Veni.231C.021.

Contact:

You may contact us by sending Merel Scholman an email (m.c.j.scholman (at) uu.nl).