RST Signalling Corpus: a corpus of signals of coherence relations

Abstract

We present the RST Signalling Corpus (Das et al., 2015), a corpus annotated for signals of coherence relations. The corpus is developed over the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2002) which is annotated for coherence relations. In the RST Signalling Corpus, these relations are further annotated with signalling information. The corpus includes annotation not only for discourse markers which are considered to be the most typical (or sometimes the only type of) signals in discourse, but also for a wide array of other signals such as reference, lexical, semantic, syntactic, graphical and genre features as potential indicators of coherence relations. We describe the research underlying the development of the corpus and the annotation process, and provide details of the corpus. We also present the results of an inter-annotator agreement study, illustrating the validity and reproducibility of the annotation. The corpus is available through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), and can be used to investigate the psycholinguistic mechanisms behind the interpretation of relations through signalling, and also to develop discourse-specific computational systems such as discourse parsing applications.

Multiple Signals of Coherence Relations

“…Note that subcategories in the figure are only illustrative, not exhaustive. For the detailed taxonomy and more information about the definitions of signals, see Das and Taboada (2018a) and the annotation manual of the corpus (Das & Taboada, 2014) 6 .…”

“…For instance, in Example [12], there are reference signals ("Mr. Gelbart" ~ "He"), but it was difficult to establish whether those contributed to signalling the Evidence relation. The distribution of relations by signals in the RST-SC (Table 1, from Das & Taboada, 2018a) shows that the overwhelming majority of the relations in the RST-DT are signalled, and also that the majority of signalled relations are indicated by other signals rather than DMs.…”

Argumentation in the 2016 US presidential elections: annotated corpora of television debates and social media reaction

“…After alluding to the sufficiency of his own resume, Rubio makes the case in Example (1) that focusing on past achievements would be detrimental to the electoral chances of a Republican candidate. 1 In (1), Rubio employs the explicit discourse marker ''because'' to signal his supporting argument that the resume of Hillary Clinton, whom he presumes will be the Democratic candidate, is better than that of any of the Republican hopefuls (van Eemeren et al 2007;Das and Taboada 2017).…”

“…Pragmatic annotation can cover various facets of discourse, ranging from, e.g., dialogue acts (Weisser 2014(Weisser , 2016Vail and Boyer 2014) to the discourse semantics of the Penn Discourse Treebank (Prasad et al 2014). Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson 1988) provides a foundation for several annotated corpora, including the RST Treebank (Carlson et al 2002), as well as purpose-built corpora, such as the analysis by Das and Taboada (2017) of indicators of coherence relations. Berzlánovich and Redeker (2012) analyse the interaction between genre and coherence relations in another study based on RST.…”

Kausazko koherentzia-erlazioen azterketa automatikoa

“…Beraz, diskurtso-markatzaileekin ez dira erlazio guztiak seinalatzen (Iruskieta et al, 2009). 9 Diskurtso-markatzaileen anbiguotasunari nahiz erlazio inplizituen arazoei aurre egiteko eta erlazio erretoriko gehiagoren ebidentzia linguistikoak izateko, zenbait autorek (Das et al, 2015;da Cunha et al, 2012;Pardo and Nunes, 2004) bestelako elementuak (erlazio funtziorik ez duten esapideak, aditzak, izenak, besteak beste) ere aztertu dituzte erlazio erretorikoen seinale 10 gisa; nahiz eta seinale horiek diskurtso-markatzaileak baino anbiguoagoak izan.…”