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Annotating Attribution in the Penn Discourse TreeBank

Summary

Many NLP applications, from extracting information and answering questions to producing summaries and generating text, need to determine whether a piece of information is presented as fact or opinion, and who it comes from. Earlier annotation work mostly labelled sentiment at the document, sentence or word level. This paper instead targets a finer semantic unit: the abstract objects (propositions, facts, eventualities) that serve as discourse relations and their arguments in the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB), which is built on the Wall Street Journal corpus. The authors extend the core attribution scheme of PDTB-1.0 with four features: source, type (degree of factuality), scopal polarity (negated attribution reversing an argument's polarity) and determinacy (contexts that cancel the attribution entailment). They also add rules for marking the text spans that signal attribution. The paper presents the scheme through annotated examples and does not report an evaluation of it. Data from the earlier scheme show that a sizeable share of relations involve non-writer sources. This makes the extended PDTB a useful resource for compositional, automatic factuality classification.

Key points

  • PDTB-1.0 contents: 100 Explicit connective types (18,505 tokens) across all 25 WSJ sections. Sections 08–10 add 2,003 implicit-relation tokens: 1,496 Implicit connectives, 19 AltLex, 435 EntRel and 53 NoRel.
  • Non-writer sources are common: under the earlier scheme, 34% of annotated relations attribute the relation or at least one argument to an agent other than the writer.
  • Source values: Wr (writer), Ot (a specific agent in the text), Arb (a generic or arbitrary source) and Inh (an argument inheriting the relation's source). Type values shown in the examples include Comm, Ftv, Att and PAtt.
  • Span rules: attribution spans may be discontinuous and exclude connectives. Implicit writer attribution gets no span. Non-clausal anchors such as "according to X" or "reportedly" are marked.
  • Implicit relations: attribution is annotated for Implicit connectives and AltLex, but not for EntRel or NoRel.

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 · Treebanks

Cited by

15 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 12 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{prasad2006annotating,
  title = {{Annotating Attribution in the Penn Discourse TreeBank}},
  author = {Prasad, Rashmi and Dinesh, Nikhil and Lee, Alan and Joshi, Aravind and Webber, Bonnie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.3115/1654641.1654646},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1654641.1654646}
}

References

24 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Nicholas. Asher. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer, Dordrecht. ↗
  2. Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2005. Attribution and the (non)-alignment of syntactic and discourse arguments of connectives. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, Ann Arbor, Michigan. find
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  9. Mitchell P. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of english: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19(2):313–330. ↗ our card
  10. Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2004. Annotating discourse connectives and their arguments. In Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation, pages 9–16, Boston, MA. find our card
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  12. Rashmi Prasad, Eleni Miltsakaki, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2004. Annotation and data mining of the Penn Discourse Treebank. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation, pages 88–95, Barcelona, Spain. find our card
  13. Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, and Bonnie Webber. 2005. The Penn Discourse TreeBank as a resource for natural language generation. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG. find our card
  14. Ellen Riloff, Janyce Wiebe, and Willian Phillips. 2005. Exploiting subjectivity classification to improve information extraction. In Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2005). find
  15. Ivan A. Sag and Carl Pollard. 1991. An integrated theory of complement control. Language, 67(1):63– 113. ↗
  16. The PDTB-Group. 2006. The Penn Discourse Tree-Bank 1.0 Annotation Manual. Technical Report IRCS-06-01, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. find
  17. Veseli Stoyanov, Claire Cardie, and Janyce Wiebe. 2005. Multi-perspective question answering using the OpQA corpus. In Proceedings of HLT-EMNLP. find
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  19. Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, M. Stone, and Alistair Knott. 2003. Anaphora and discourse structure. Computational Linguistics, 29(4):545–587. ↗ our card
  20. Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, and K. Forbes. 2005. A short introduction to the PDTB. In Copenhagen Working Papers in Language and Speech Processing. find
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  23. Theresa Wilson and Janyce Wiebe. 2005. Annotating attributions and private states. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, Ann Arbor, Michigan. find
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