DETEC 2026: Discourse Expectations - Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives

DETEC 2026: Discourse Expectations — Theoretical, Experimental and Computational Perspectives is a specialized conference examining how listeners and readers form predictions about upcoming discourse, how those predictions are confirmed or violated, and what this reveals about the architecture of language comprehension. Topics include coherence relation processing, pragmatic inference and implicature, reference resolution and coreference, psycholinguistic studies of discourse, computational models of discourse understanding, and the interplay between world knowledge and linguistic structure in text comprehension.

DETEC 2026 brings together theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and computational linguists who study discourse at multiple levels of analysis. The conference's distinctive focus on expectation and prediction connects it to broader debates in cognitive science about predictive processing and probabilistic language models. Graduate students working on discourse, pragmatics, or psycholinguistics will find the conference's interdisciplinary scope and integration of experimental, theoretical, and computational perspectives particularly enriching for their own research development.

discourse processing pragmatic inference psycholinguistics natural language processing coherence relations reference resolution language comprehension computational linguistics