QUD-Based Annotation of Discourse Structure and Information Structure: Tool and Evaluation

We discuss and evaluate a new annotation scheme and discourse-analytic method, the QUD-tree framework. We present an annotation study, in which the framework, based on the concept of Questions under Discussion, is applied to English and German interview data, using TreeAnno, an annotation tool specially developed for this new kind of discourse annotation. The results of an inter-annotator agreement study show that the new annotation method allows for reasonable agreement with regard to discourse structure and good agreement with regard to the annotation of information structure, which covers focus, background, contrastive topic and non-at-issue material.