This study addresses the fundamental task of discourse unit detection – the critical initial step in discourse parsing. We analyze how various discourse frameworks conceptualize and structure discourse units, with a focus on their underlying taxonomies and theoretical assumptions. While approaches to discourse segmentation vary considerably, the extent to which these conceptual divergences influence practical implementations remains insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we investigate similarities and differences in segmentation across several English datasets, segmented and annotated according to distinct discourse frameworks, using a simple, rule-based heuristics. We evaluate the effectiveness of rules with respect to gold-standard segmentation, while also checking variability and cross-framework generalizability. Additionally, we conduct a manual comparison of a sample of rule-based segmentation outputs against benchmark segmentation, identifying points of convergence and divergence.Our findings indicate that discourse frameworks align strongly at the level of segmentation: particular clauses consistently serve as the primary boundaries of discourse units. Discrepancies arise mainly in the treatment of other structures, such as adpositional phrases, appositions, interjections, and parenthesised text segments, which are inconsistently marked as separate discourse units across formalisms.

The aim of this paper is to replicate and extend recent treebank-based considerations regarding the syntactic structure of coordination. Overall, we confirm the previous results that, given the principle of Dependency Length Minimization, corpus data suggest that the structure of coordination is symmetric. While previous work was based on 2 English datasets, we extend the investigation to 3 more English datasets, 3 Polish datasets, and UD corpora for a number of diverse languages. The results confirm the symmetric structure of coordination, but they also make it possible to question some of the previous findings regarding the exact symmetric structure of coordination.