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Towards Corpus-Based Population and Visualization of ISO 24617-8 Ontology (Short Paper)

Summary

Formal OWL ontologies for discourse, such as the ISO 24617-8 module in OLiA's Discourse Extensions, are difficult for most linguists to use. General tools like Protégé are designed for ontology engineers, not for corpus-oriented exploration. Czerski and Ogrodniczuk address this gap in two ways. First, they extend the ISO 24617-8 ontology so that real corpus examples become formal instances. Each example links a typed discourse relation to its argument roles and, where present, an explicit connective. They tested this population method on three ISO-compatible sources in Polish and English:

  • a mini-corpus of examples from the Polish Discourse Corpus guidelines,
  • a mini-corpus of examples from the ISO standard itself,
  • the complete PDC.

Second, they built an Ontology Viewer for browsing, filtering and full-text search of these examples by language, relation type and connective. The viewer can be organised either around relations or around connectives. The authors present this as evidence that corpus-driven instantiation and its visualisation are feasible. The work lays groundwork for adding further multilingual discourse corpora as interoperable Linked Data resources.

Key points

  • Modular file layout. The original OLiA discourse.ISO.owl, which covers 20 relations and their argument roles, is left unchanged. Project additions go into discourse.ISO.Ext.owl, and each corpus gets its own discourse.ISO.<corpus>.owl file (e.g. discourse.ISO.PDC.owl).
  • New properties.
    • hasConnective links any DRel to an olia:ExplicitConnective.
    • Role-specific object properties attach typed arguments to a relation, e.g. hasGoal and hasEnablement for Purpose.
  • Instance encoding. Each example is an owl:NamedIndividual. Its label holds the full text, skos:notation holds the identifier (e.g. Cause-1, Purpose-a), and skos:order records the linear order of segments.
  • Design choice. The authors chose standard OWL 2 over RDF-star for compatibility with reasoners, Protégé and SPARQL querying.
  • Excluded relations. Functional dependence and Feedback dependence, which concern dialogue acts, are not represented. These relations are also absent from PDC annotation.

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

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2rnd2m8mdomd

@inproceedings{ogrodniczuk2026corpus,
  title = {{Towards Corpus-Based Population and Visualization of ISO 24617-8 Ontology (Short Paper)}},
  author = {Ogrodniczuk, Maciej and Czerski, Dariusz},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation and Representation (ISA-22) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2rnd2m8mdomd},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2rnd2m8mdomd}
}

References

14 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Harry Bunt and Rashmi Prasad. 2016. ISO DR-Core (ISO 24617-8): Core Concepts for the Annotation of Discourse Relations. In Proceedings of the 10th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-12), pages 45–54. find
  2. Christian Chiarcos. 2014. Towards interoperable discourse annotation. Discourse features in the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), pages 4569–4577, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources… find
  3. Debopam Das, Tatjana Scheffler, Peter Bourgonje, and Manfred Stede. 2018. Constructing a Lexicon of English Discourse Connectives. In Pro-http://udisc.org/ceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 360–365, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguis… find our card
  4. Tania Tudorache, Csongor Nyulas, Natalya F. Noy, and Mark A. Musen. 2013. WebProtégé: A collaborative ontology editor and knowledge acquisition tool for the web. Semantic Web, (1):89–99. find
  5. ISO. 2016. ISO 24617-8:2016: Language resource management – Semantic annotation framework (SemAF) – Part 8: Semantic relations in discourse, core annotation schema (DR-core). 10. find
  6. Language Resource References Ogrodniczuk, Maciej. 2024. Polish Discourse Corpus. Institute of Compute Science, Polish Academy of Sciences. PID https://zil.ipipan.waw.pl/PolishDiscourseCorpus. ↗
  7. ISO. 2020. ISO 24617-2:2020: Language resource management – Semantic annotation framework (SemAF) – Part 2: Dialogue acts. find
  8. Thomas Krause and Amir Zeldes. 2014. ANNIS3: A new architecture for generic corpus query and visualization. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31(1):118–139. find
  9. Mark A. Musen. 2015. The Protégé Project: A Look Back and a Look Forward. AI Matters, 1(4):4–12. find
  10. Maciej Ogrodniczuk. 2021. Założenia dla korpusu metatekstowego (EN: Discourse corpus guidelines). Technical report, CLARIN-PL. Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences. find
  11. Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Aleksandra Tomaszewska, Daniel Ziembicki, Sebastian Żurowski, Ryszard Tuora, and Aleksandra Zwierzchowska. 2024. Polish Discourse Corpus (PDC): Corpus design, ISO-compliant annotation, data highlights, and parser development. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Confere… find
  12. Purificação Silvano, Mariana Damova, Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė, Chaya Liebeskind, Christian Chiarcos, Dimitar Trajanov, Ciprian-Octavian Truică, Elena-Simona Apostol, and Anna Baczkowska. 2022. ISO-based Annotated Multilingual Parallel Corpus for Discourse Markers. In Proceedings of the Thi… find
  13. Manfred Stede, Tatjana Scheffler, and Amália Mendes. 2019. Connective-Lex: A Web-Based Multilingual Lexical Resource for Connectives. Discours, pages 1–38. find
  14. Jan Štěpánek and Petr Pajas. 2010. Querying Diverse Treebanks in a Uniform Way. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). find

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