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Developing the Bangla RST Discourse Treebank

Summary

Bangla has about 177 million speakers, yet its available corpora mostly cover speech transcription, POS or lemma tagging, or are unannotated. Before this work it had no text corpus annotated for discourse structure. Das and Stede address this gap by launching the Bangla RST Discourse Treebank (Bangla RST-DT). It is a collection of 266 newspaper texts that are being annotated for coherence relations such as Cause or Evidence, using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as the framework.

The annotation scheme adapts the guidelines of the German Potsdam Commentary Corpus (PCC) and the English SLSeg segmenter. The authors checked the segmentation rules against Bangla grammar references and corpus examples to see whether clause-based segmentation suits Bangla structures. They report that the core principles carry over largely intact, with adjustments for language-specific constructions.

In the pilot phase, a team of annotators labeled 16 texts, and an inter-annotator agreement study tested how reliable the guidelines are and how reproducible the annotation is. Once complete, the resource should support cross-linguistic discourse research and NLP tasks such as summarization, machine translation and sentiment analysis.

Key points

  • Bangla RST-DT contains 266 newspaper texts covering eight sub-genres, including business news, editorials and sports reports. The authors describe it as the first discourse-annotated corpus for Bangla.
  • The guidelines build on PCC (Stede, 2016), an updated PCC version from Das et al. (2017), and SLSeg (Tofiloski et al., 2009).
  • Annotation has three steps: segmenting text into EDUs, assigning relations, and building a single-rooted RST tree.
  • Under the segmentation rules, every EDU must contain a verb. Coordinated clauses, adjunct clauses and non-restrictive relatives count as EDUs. Clausal subjects, clausal complements and attribution clauses do not.
  • In the initial phase, 16 texts were annotated and evaluated in an inter-annotator agreement study.

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

9 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 7 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{das2018developing,
  title = {{Developing the Bangla RST Discourse Treebank}},
  author = {Das, Debopam and Stede, Manfred},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.63317/56fzpsjj9h76},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/56fzpsjj9h76}
}

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