We present the RST Continuity Corpus (RST-CC), a corpus of discourse relations annotated for continuity dimensions. Continuity or discontinuity (maintaining or shifting deictic centres across discourse segments) is an important property of discourse relations, but the two are correlated in greatly varying ways. To analyse this correlation, the relations in the RST-CC are annotated using operationalised versions of Givón’s (1993) continuity dimensions. We also report on the inter-annotator agreement, and discuss recurrent annotation issues. First results show substantial variation of continuity dimensions within and across relation types.

The paper presents our work on corpus annotationfor metaphor in German. Metaphors denoteentities that are similar to their literal referent,e.g., when *Licht* ‘light’ is used in the senseof ‘hope’. We are interested in the relation betweenmetaphor and register, hence, the corpusincludes material from different registers. We focussed on metaphors that can serve asregister markers and can also be reliably indentifiedfor annotation. Our results show hugedifferences between registers in metaphor usage,which we interpret in terms of specificproperties of the registers.

The paper presents current work on a German corpus annotated for metaphor. Metaphors denote entities or situations that are in some sense similar to the literal referent, e.g., when “Handschrift” ‘signature’ is used in the sense of ‘distinguishing mark’ or the suppression of hopes is introduced by the verb “verschütten” ‘bury’. The corpus is part of a project on register, hence, includes material from different registers that represent register variation along a number of important dimensions, but we believe that it is of interest to research on metaphor in general. The corpus extends previous annotation initiatives in that it not only annotates the metaphoric expressions themselves but also their respective relevant contexts that trigger a metaphorical interpretation of the expressions. For the corpus, we developed extended annotation guidelines, which specifically focus not only on the identification of these metaphoric contexts but also analyse in detail specific linguistic challenges for metaphor annotation that emerge due to the grammar of German.

We present the first annotated resource for the aspectual classification of German verb tokens in their clausal context. We use aspectual features compatible with the plurality of aspectual classifications in previous work and treat aspectual ambiguity systematically. We evaluate our corpus by using it to train supervised classifiers to automatically assign aspectual categories to verbs in context, permitting favourable comparisons to previous work.

We have compiled a corpus of 80 Dutch texts from expository and persuasive genres, which we annotated for rhetorical and genre-specific discourse structure, and lexical cohesion with the goal of creating a gold standard for further research. The annota¬tions are based on a segmentation of the text in elementary discourse units that takes into account cues from syntax and punctuation. During the labor-intensive discourse-structure annotation (RST analysis), we took great care to thoroughly reconcile the initial analyses. That process and the availability of two independent initial analyses for each text allows us to analyze our disagreements and to assess the confusability of RST relations, and thereby improve the annotation guidelines and gather evidence for the classification of these relations into larger groups. We are using this resource for corpus-based studies of discourse relations, discourse markers, cohesion, and genre differences, e.g., the question of how discourse structure and lexical cohesion interact for different genres in the overall organization of texts. We are also exploring automatic text segmentation and semi-automatic discourse annotation.

This paper contributes to the question of which degree of complexity is called for in representations of discourse structure. We review recent claims that tree structures do not suffice as a model for discourse structure, with a focus on the work done on the Discourse Graphbank (DGB) of Wolf and Gibson (2005, 2006). We will show that much of the additional complexity in the DGB is not inherent in the data, but due to specific design choices that underlie W&G’s annotation. Three kinds of configuration are identified whose DGB analysis violates tree-structure constraints, but for which an analysis in terms of tree structures is possible, viz., crossed dependencies that are eventually based on lexical or referential overlap, multiple-parent structures that could be handled in terms of Marcu’s (1996) Nuclearity Principle, and potential list structures, in which whole lists of segments are related to a preceding segment in the same way. We also discuss the recent results which Lee et al. (2008) adduce as evidence for a complexity of discourse structure that cannot be handled in terms of tree structures.