In this paper we describe the development of a schema for the annotation of attribution relations and present the first findings and some relevant issues concerning this phenomenon. Following the D-LTAG approach to discourse, we have developed a lexically anchored description of attribution, considering this relation, contrary to the approach in the PDTB, independently from other discourse relations. This approach has allowed us to deal with the phenomenon in a broader perspective than previous studies, reaching therefore a more accurate description of it and making it possible to raise some still unaddressed issues. Following this analysis, we propose an annotation schema and discuss the first results concerning its applicability. The schema has been applied to a pilot portion of the ISST corpus of Italian and represents the initial phase of a project aiming at the creation of an Italian Discourse Treebank. We believe this work will raise some awareness concerning the fundamental importance of attribution relations. The identification of the source has in fact strong implications for the attributed material. Moreover, it will make overt the complexity of a phenomenon for long underestimated.

In recent years we have resgitered a renewed interest in event detection and temporal processing of text/discourse. TimeML (Pustejovsky et al., 2003a) has shed new lights on the notion of event and developed a new methodology for its annotation. On a parallel, works on anaphora resolution have developed a reliable methodology for the annotation and pointed out the core role of this phenomenon for the improvement of NLP systems. This paper tries to put together these two lines of research by describing a case study for the creation of an annotation scheme on event anaphora. We claim that this work could have consequences for the annotation of eventualities as proposed in TimeML and on the use of the tag and on the study of anaphora and its annotation. The annotation scheme and its guidelines have been developed on the basis of a coarse grained bottom up approach. In order to do this, we have performed a small sampling annotation which has highlighted shortcomings and open issues which need to be resolved.

The aim of this work is the presentation and preliminary evaluation of an XML annotation scheme for marking bridging anaphors of the form “definite article + N” in Italian. The scheme is based on a corpus-study. The data we collected from the evaluation experiment seem to support the reliability of the scheme, although some problems still remain open.