Step by step: underspecified markup in incremental rhetorical analysis

This paper proposes an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees, which allows for underspecification in human and automatic analysis, and discusses the various design decisions involved.

Abstract

While quite a few linguistic corpora with syntactic annotations are available today, resources are scarce on the level of discourse annotation. As a step toward flexible, extendible annotation schemes, we propose an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees. For human and automatic analysis alike, rhetorical structure is often difficult and assigned incrementally. Thus, our for-mat allows for underspecification. The paper discusses the various design de-cisions involved, illustrates the format with an example, and sketches some ap-plications. 1