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Annotating Discourse Connectives in the Chinese Treebank

Summary

This paper sets out the annotation issues for the Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB). The CDTB adds a discourse layer on top of the Penn Chinese Treebank and follows the same lexically grounded approach as the English PDTB. Unlike Rhetorical Structure Theory, it does not begin from a fixed inventory of relations. Instead, each relation is anchored by a connective that functions as a two-place predicate whose arguments are abstract entities, for instance events, situations or propositions.

The author catalogues the explicit connective types and gives annotated newswire examples for each: subordinate conjunctions, coordinate conjunctions and discourse adverbials. Implicit connectives inferred between adjacent units are also planned. The paper fixes labeling conventions for ARG1 and ARG2 and examines which syntactic units can serve as arguments. It identifies the hardest problem as deciding argument spans, because discourse relations nest recursively.

Two further needs are argued for: separating discourse from non-discourse uses of a word and distinguishing a connective's senses, and handling the many surface variants of a single relation. This position paper offers design guidance for building a Chinese discourse resource that supports applications such as machine translation.

Key points

  • CDTB builds on the Penn Chinese Treebank, mirrors the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) and parallels the Chinese Propbank. The difference is that the number of arguments is fixed at two, while their extents are uncertain.
  • Argument labeling conventions:
    • A subordinate clause is always ARG1, whatever its position.
    • Coordinated arguments are numbered in order of appearance.
    • For adverbials, the argument adjacent to the connective is ARG2.
    • Connectives themselves are excluded from the argument spans.
  • Chinese-specific phenomena covered:
    • paired subordinate and coordinate connectives that jointly anchor one relation;
    • modified connectives in clause-medial position, which make ARG1 discontinuous;
    • conjoined subordinate conjunctions.
  • Hierarchical structure is not annotated explicitly. It can be recovered when one relation is embedded as an argument of another.
  • One connective may correspond to "while", "but", "and" or "instead", or may have no discourse function at all. Conversely, concession can be expressed by many variant forms, arising from historical change and abbreviation (suoxie).

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

21 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 8 of them have a page here, 13 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{xue2005annotating,
  title = {{Annotating Discourse Connectives in the Chinese Treebank}},
  author = {Xue, Nianwen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotations II: Pie in the Sky},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.3115/1608829.1608841},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1608829.1608841}
}

References

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

  1. Lynn Carlson, Daniel Marcu, and Mary Ellen Okurowski. 2003. Building a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. In Current Directions in Discourse and Dialogue. Kluwer Academic Publishers. find our card
  2. William Mann and Sandra Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical Sturcture Theory. Text, 8(3):243–281. find
  3. E. Miltsakaki, R. Prasad, A. Joshi, and B. Webber. 2004a. The Penn Discourse Treebank. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal. find our card
  4. E. Miltsakaki, R. Prasad, A. Joshi, and B. Webber. 2004b. The Penn Discourse Treebank. In Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation, Boston, Massachusetts. find our card
  5. Martha Palmer, Dan Gildea, and Paul Kingsbury. 2005. The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 31(1). find our card
  6. B. Webber and A. Joshi. 1998. Anchoring a lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar for discourse. In In ACL/COLING Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers, Montreal, Canada. find
  7. Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone, and Aravind Joshi. 1999. Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalized TAG. In Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, College Park, MD. find
  8. Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Matthew Stone, and Alistair Knott. 2003. Anaphora and discourse structure. Computational Linguistics, 29(4):545–587. find our card
  9. Nianwen Xue and Martha Palmer. 2003. Annotating the Propositions in the Penn Chinese Treebank. In The Proceedings of the 2nd SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing, Sapporo, Japan. find
  10. Nianwen Xue, Fei Xia, Fu dong Chiou, and Martha Palmer. To appear. The Penn Chinese Treebank: Phrase Structure Annotation of a Large Corpus. Natural Language Engineering. find

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