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

Rashmi Prasad, Katherine Forbes Riley, Alan Lee

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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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W17-5502.pdf