Building the AURIS Corpus of Reference and Information Structure

Christian Chiarcos, Christian Fäth, Tabea Gröger, Quentin Alastair Frey


Abstract
We present AURIS, the Augsburg corpus for Reference and Information Structure, a multilingual corpus annotated for reference, discourse relations, and aspects of information structure. AURIS introduces an innovative use of off-the-shelf spreadsheet software for complex annotation tasks, reducing technical barriers and dependencies common in discourse annotation. Designed for classroom use, it enables linguistics and philology students to explore diverse theoretical frameworks while working in their language of choice. The paper focuses on technical design and workflows that integrate and generate pre-annotations from heterogeneous sources. Despite its low-tech approach, AURIS aligns with established standards and remains interoperable with existing projects. Preprocessing scripts support multiple languages, with an initial annotation round on German texts evaluated against TED-MDB and ParCorFull data converted into AURIS formats. This approach demonstrates that accessible tools can yield high-quality, replicable annotations for discourse and information-structure research.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.160
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2035–2047
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.160/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christian Chiarcos, Christian Fäth, Tabea Gröger, and Quentin Alastair Frey. 2026. Building the AURIS Corpus of Reference and Information Structure. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:2035–2047.
Cite (Informal):
Building the AURIS Corpus of Reference and Information Structure (Chiarcos et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.160.pdf