We present the project of classification of Prague Discourse Treebank documents (Czech journalistic texts) for their genres. Our main interest lies in opening the possibility to observe how text coherence is realized in different types (in the genre sense) of language data and, in the future, in exploring the ways of using genres as a feature for multi-sentence-level language technologies. In the paper, we first describe the motivation and the concept of the genre annotation, and briefly introduce the Prague Discourse Treebank. Then, we elaborate on the process of manual annotation of genres in the treebank, from the annotators’ manual work to post-annotation checks and to the inter-annotator agreement measurements. The annotated genres are subsequently analyzed together with discourse relations (already annotated in the treebank) ― we present distributions of the annotated genres and results of studying distinctions of distributions of discourse relations across the individual genres.

This contribution explores the subgroup of text structuring expressions with the form preposition + demonstrative pronoun, thus it is devoted to an aspect of the interaction of coreference relations and relations signaled by discourse connectives (DCs) in a text. The demonstrative pronoun typically signals a referential link to an antecedent, whereas the whole expression can, but does not have to, carry a discourse meaning in sense of discourse connectives. We describe the properties of these phrases/expressions with regard to their antecedents, their position among the text-structuring language means and their features typical for the “connective function” of them compared to their “non-connective function”. The analysis is carried out on Czech data from the approx. 50,000 sentences of the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0, directly on the syntactic trees. We explore the characteristics of these phrases/expressions discovered during two projects: the manual annotation of 1, coreference relations (Nedoluzhko et al. 2011) and 2, discourse connectives, their scopes and meanings (Mladová et al. 2008).

In this paper, we present the first results of the parallel Czech discourse annotation in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0. Having established an annotation scenario for capturing semantic relations crossing the sentence boundary in a discourse, and having annotated the first sections of the treebank according to these guidelines, we report now on the results of the first evaluation of these manual annotations. We give an overview of the process of the annotation itself, which we believe is to a large degree language-independent and therefore accessible to any discourse researcher. Next, we describe the inter-annotator agreement measurement, and, most importantly, we classify and analyze the most common types of annotators’ disagreement and propose solutions for the next phase of the annotation. The annotation is carried out on dependency trees (on the tectogrammatical layer), this approach is quite novel and it brings us some advantages when interpreting the syntactic structure of the discourse units.