Abstract
The paper presents the Chinese Discourse TreeBank, a corpus annotated with Penn Discourse TreeBank style discourse relations that take the form of a predicate taking two arguments. We first characterize the syntactic and statistical distributions of Chinese discourse connectives as well as the role of Chinese punctuation marks in discourse annotation, and then describe how we design our annotation strategy procedure based on this characterization. The Chinese-specific features of our annotation strategy include annotating explicit and implicit discourse relations in one single pass, defining the argument labels on semantic, rather than syntactic, grounds, as well as annotating the semantic type of implicit discourse relations directly. We also introduce a flat, 11-valued semantic type classification scheme for discourse relations. We finally demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with evaluation results.
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Notes
In this and subsequent examples, DE is used to gloss
, a particle in Chinese that does not have an English equivalent. Similarly, CL is used to gloss Chinese classifiers.As one reviewer points out, avoiding discontinuous arguments in all cases may not be possible for other languages. For example, for an English sentence like “The little boy, when asked about the game, squealed in delight”, there is no obvious way of avoiding discontinuous arguments. We are not suggesting that discontinuous arguments should be eliminated at all cost. Instead, we argue that it is desirable to minimize the number of discontinuous arguments when this is warranted by the linguistic facts of the language.
This data will be released via the LDC.
There are instances where a punctuation mark does not exist, e.g., between a section title and the paragraph that follows the section title. In this case the line break is treated as the punctuation mark and it signals the existence of a discourse relation.
Following the practice of the PDTB, when computing the agreement, we lump the finer-grained semantic types together into the coarser-grained semantic classes before performing the computation.
, a particle in Chinese that does not have an English equivalent. Similarly, CL is used to gloss Chinese classifiers.References
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the IIS Division of the National Science Foundation via Grant No. 0910532 entitled “Richer Representations for Machine Translation” and by the CNS Division via Grant No. 0855184 entitled “Building a community resource for temporal inference in Chinese”. All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the view of the National Science Foundation. We would like to thank Jill Lu and Jennifer Zhang for their help with the annotation effort.
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Zhou, Y., Xue, N. The Chinese Discourse TreeBank: a Chinese corpus annotated with discourse relations. Lang Resources & Evaluation 49, 397–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-014-9290-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-014-9290-3