Vera Demberg, Merel C. J. Scholman, Fatemeh Torabi Asr
{"title":"How compatible are our discourse annotation frameworks? Insights from mapping RST-DT and PDTB annotations","authors":"Vera Demberg, Merel C. J. Scholman, Fatemeh Torabi Asr","doi":"10.5087/dad.2019.104","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Discourse-annotated corpora are an important resource for the community, but they are often annotated according to different frameworks. This makes joint usage of the annotations difficult, preventing researchers from searching the corpora in a unified way, or using all annotated data jointly to train computational systems. Several theoretical proposals have recently been made for mapping the relational labels of different frameworks to each other, but these proposals have so far not been validated against existing annotations. The two largest discourse relation annotated resources, the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank, have however been annotated on the same texts, allowing for a direct comparison of the annotation layers. We propose a method for automatically aligning the discourse segments, and then evaluate existing mapping proposals by comparing the empirically observed against the proposed mappings. Our analysis highlights the influence of segmentation on subsequent discourse relation labelling, and shows that while agreement between frameworks is reasonable for explicit relations, agreement on implicit relations is low. We identify several sources of systematic discrepancies between the two annotation schemes and discuss consequences for future annotation and for usage of the existing resources.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"16","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Dialogue and Discourse","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2019.104","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 16
Abstract
Discourse-annotated corpora are an important resource for the community, but they are often annotated according to different frameworks. This makes joint usage of the annotations difficult, preventing researchers from searching the corpora in a unified way, or using all annotated data jointly to train computational systems. Several theoretical proposals have recently been made for mapping the relational labels of different frameworks to each other, but these proposals have so far not been validated against existing annotations. The two largest discourse relation annotated resources, the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank, have however been annotated on the same texts, allowing for a direct comparison of the annotation layers. We propose a method for automatically aligning the discourse segments, and then evaluate existing mapping proposals by comparing the empirically observed against the proposed mappings. Our analysis highlights the influence of segmentation on subsequent discourse relation labelling, and shows that while agreement between frameworks is reasonable for explicit relations, agreement on implicit relations is low. We identify several sources of systematic discrepancies between the two annotation schemes and discuss consequences for future annotation and for usage of the existing resources.
期刊介绍:
D&D seeks previously unpublished, high quality articles on the analysis of discourse and dialogue that contain -experimental and/or theoretical studies related to the construction, representation, and maintenance of (linguistic) context -linguistic analysis of phenomena characteristic of discourse and/or dialogue (including, but not limited to: reference and anaphora, presupposition and accommodation, topicality and salience, implicature, ---discourse structure and rhetorical relations, discourse markers and particles, the semantics and -pragmatics of dialogue acts, questions, imperatives, non-sentential utterances, intonation, and meta--communicative phenomena such as repair and grounding) -experimental and/or theoretical studies of agents'' information states and their dynamics in conversational interaction -new analytical frameworks that advance theoretical studies of discourse and dialogue -research on systems performing coreference resolution, discourse structure parsing, event and temporal -structure, and reference resolution in multimodal communication -experimental and/or theoretical results yielding new insight into non-linguistic interaction in -communication -work on natural language understanding (including spoken language understanding), dialogue management, -reasoning, and natural language generation (including text-to-speech) in dialogue systems -work related to the design and engineering of dialogue systems (including, but not limited to: -evaluation, usability design and testing, rapid application deployment, embodied agents, affect detection, -mixed-initiative, adaptation, and user modeling). -extremely well-written surveys of existing work. Highest priority is given to research reports that are specifically written for a multidisciplinary audience. The audience is primarily researchers on discourse and dialogue and its associated fields, including computer scientists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, roboticists, sociologists.