Book Review: Discourse Processing by Manfred Stede

Multi - level annotation for discourse research

Discourse Processing

The observation that discourse is more than a mere sequence of utterances or sentences amounts to a truism. But what follows from this? In what way does the ”value added” arise when segments of discourse are juxtaposed how does hierarchical structure originate from a linearized discourse? While many discourse phenomena apply to dialogue and monologue alike, this tutorial will center its attenti...

Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.0: Annotation for Discourse Research

We present a revised and extended version of the Potsdam Commentary Corpus, a collection of 175 German newspaper commentaries (op-ed pieces) that has been annotated with syntax trees and three layers of discourse-level information: nominal coreference, connectives and their arguments (similar to the PDTB, (Prasad et al., 2008)), and trees reflecting discourse structure according to Rhetorical S...

Adding Semantic Relations to a Large-Coverage Connective Lexicon of German

DiMLex is a lexicon of German connectives that can be used for various language understanding purposes. We enhanced the coverage to 275 connectives, which we regard as covering all known German discourse connectives in current use. In this paper, we consider the task of adding the semantic relations that can be expressed by each connective. After discussing different approaches to retrieving se...

Parallel Discourse Annotations on a Corpus of Short Texts

We present the first corpus of texts annotated with two alternative approaches to discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988) and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). 112 short argumentative texts have been analyzed according to these two theories. Furthermore, in previous work, the same texts have already been annotated for thei...