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Explicit Discourse Argument Extraction for German

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Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11697))

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Abstract

We present an approach to the extraction of arguments for explicit discourse relations in German, as a sub-task of the larger task of shallow discourse parsing for German. Using the Potsdam Commentary Corpus, we evaluate two methods (one based on constituency trees, the other based on dependency trees) to extract both the internal and the external argument, for which our best results are 86.73 and 77.85 respectively. We demonstrate portability of this set of heuristics to another language and also put these scores into perspective by applying the same method to English and compare this to published results.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For readability, only the relation with id 5 is shown in this excerpt. In the corpus, relations are also annotated for the connectives Und and um...zu in this sample text. Note that this example is not glossed, as its purpose is illustrating the structure of annotations in our corpus, not so much its actual content.

  2. 2.

    https://spacy.io/models/de.

  3. 3.

    Note that while the PCC guidelines allow for these constructions, they contain no syntactic directives per se and instruct the annotator to select the minimal token span necessary to interpret the discourse relation without phrasing this in terms of syntactic units.

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Acknowledgments

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 323949969. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Computational Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Peter Bourgonje & Manfred Stede

Authors
  1. Peter Bourgonje
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  2. Manfred Stede
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Correspondence to Peter Bourgonje .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Kamil Ekštein

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Bourgonje, P., Stede, M. (2019). Explicit Discourse Argument Extraction for German. In: Ekštein, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11697. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27947-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27947-9_3

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