Annotating Discourse Relations in Spoken Language: A Comparison of the PDTB and CCR Frameworks

We describe preliminary work on applying the Penn Discourse Treebank framework (PDTB, Prasad et al., 2008) and the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (CCR, Sanders, Spooren & Noordman, 1992) to spoken language. Due to register differences, we do not only expect to see a distribution of discourse relations that deviates from the one in written text, but also expect to come across new relations that are not yet covered by the two frameworks (for an application of the PDTB annotation scheme to spoken Italian see Tonelli et al., 2010).