Towards Full Text Shallow Discourse Relation Annotation: Experiments with Cross-Paragraph Implicit Relations in the PDTB

Rashmi Prasad, Katherine Forbes Riley, Alan Lee


Abstract
Full text discourse parsing relies on texts comprehensively annotated with discourse relations. To this end, we address a significant gap in the inter-sentential discourse relations annotated in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), namely the class of cross-paragraph implicit relations, which account for 30% of inter-sentential relations in the corpus. We present our annotation study to explore the incidence rate of adjacent vs. non-adjacent implicit relations in cross-paragraph contexts, and the relative degree of difficulty in annotating them. Our experiments show a high incidence of non-adjacent relations that are difficult to annotate reliably, suggesting the practicality of backing off from their annotation to reduce noise for corpus-based studies. Our resulting guidelines follow the PDTB adjacency constraint for implicits while employing an underspecified representation of non-adjacent implicits, and yield 62% inter-annotator agreement on this task.
Anthology ID:
W17-5502
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Saarbrücken, Germany
Editors:
Kristiina Jokinen, Manfred Stede, David DeVault, Annie Louis
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–16
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5502
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5502
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rashmi Prasad, Katherine Forbes Riley, and Alan Lee. 2017. Towards Full Text Shallow Discourse Relation Annotation: Experiments with Cross-Paragraph Implicit Relations in the PDTB. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 7–16, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Full Text Shallow Discourse Relation Annotation: Experiments with Cross-Paragraph Implicit Relations in the PDTB (Prasad et al., SIGDIAL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/W17-5502.pdf