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The Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.2: Extending Annotations for Shallow Discourse Parsing

Summary

German has no end-to-end shallow discourse parser, partly because there is little training data annotated in the PDTB style. This paper presents version 2.2 of the Potsdam Commentary Corpus (PCC), a German collection of newspaper opinion pieces. The corpus already carried several annotation layers. Earlier versions marked only explicit connectives and their arguments, with no senses attached.

The authors add two things:

  • Senses for explicit relations, using the PDTB 3.0 sense hierarchy.
  • A new layer for non-explicit relations between adjacent sentences in the same paragraph. These are labelled as implicit (with an inserted connective), AltLex, EntRel or NoRel. The selection rules follow the PDTB 2.0 manual, and senses again follow PDTB 3.0.

Annotators did not use the dedicated tools Connanno or the PDTB Annotator. They entered senses directly into XML attributes and labelled sentence pairs in tab-separated spreadsheets, which were then automatically checked for consistency. The corpus was also revised and moved to standoff XML. The paper reports inter-annotator agreement and compares corpus statistics with the PDTB. The result is a small German counterpart to the PDTB that can be used to train and evaluate shallow discourse parsers.

Key points

  • Corpus size: PCC contains 175 editorials from a German regional newspaper, with just over 34k words in more than 2,100 sentences. The PDTB has over 1m words.
  • Sense hierarchy: PDTB 3.0 senses have three levels: 4 classes (Temporal, Contingency, Comparison, Expansion), 22 types and 28 sub-types.
  • Scope of the new layer: Only inter-sentential non-explicit relations were annotated. Intra-sentential implicit relations, as covered in PDTB 3.0, are left for future work.
  • Earlier releases: PCC 2.1 added aboutness topics, automatic Universal Dependencies parses and access through the ANNIS3 browser. Version 2.2 adds the new layers and converts the connective layer from inline XML to standoff XML.
  • Missing figures: The paper reports agreement scores and PDTB comparison statistics, but these numbers were not in the extracted text provided. Check the original before citing them.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

27 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 11 of them have a page here, 16 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{bourgonje2020potsdam,
  title = {{The Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.2: Extending Annotations for Shallow Discourse Parsing}},
  author = {Bourgonje, Peter and Stede, Manfred},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.133/}
}

References

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