Toward Cross-theory Discourse Relation Annotation

Abstract

In this exploratory study, we attempt to automatically induce PDTB-style relations from RST trees. We work with a German corpus of news commentary articles, annotated for RST trees and explicit PDTB-style relations and we focus on inducing the implicit relations in an automated way. Preliminary results look promising as a high-precision (but low-recall) way of finding implicit relations where there is no shallow structure annotated at all, but mapping proves more difficult in cases where EDUs and relation arguments overlap, yet do not seem to signal the same relation.