Annotating Structural Constraints in Discourse Corpora

Abstract

An enriched corpus annotation lies at the core of this paper. We will argue for an annotation that builds upon the tagging of moves and is thus meant as addendum to existing annotations. To this end, we will propose some way of marking up the fulfilment and violation of constraints by an xml-annotation which thereby allows to predict where rhetorical relations might occur: only if all constraints are fulfilled between two discourse units a rhetorical relation can obtain between them. As a starting point, two constraints will be explained and annotated which play an important role in discourse, namely Polanyi’s Right Frontier Constraint and a constraint we will term Semantic Compatibility Constraint. Our approach acknowledges and supports Asher’s and Lascarides’ principle Maximise Discourse Coherence [1].