Building a discourse-tagged corpus in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory
Published 1 January 2001Open access
Lynn Carlson, Daniel Marcu, Mary Ellen Okurowski
Citations600
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
Working in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory, a large annotated resource with very high consistency is created, using a well-defined methodology and protocol to enable researchers to develop empirically grounded, discourse-specific applications.
Abstract
We describe our experience in developing a discourse-annotated corpus for community-wide use. Working in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory, we were able to create a large annotated resource with very high consistency, using a well-defined methodology and protocol. This resource is made publicly available through the Linguistic Data Consortium to enable researchers to develop empirically grounded, discourse-specific applications.
Keywords
Computer ScienceArts and Humanities
Revue économiqueNonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences
35,492 Citations1958Henri Guitton, Sidney Siegel
Journal of the American Statistical AssociationContent Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology.
24,566 Citations1984Mack Shelley, Klaus Krippendorff
LanguageA simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation
11,020 Citations1974Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff +1 more
On the basis of research using audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations, the chapter highlights the organization of turn taking for conversation and extracts some of the interest that organization has.
Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank
7,528 Citations1993Mitchell P. Marcus
Journal of the Franklin InstituteNonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences
7,279 Citations1957Laurence C. McGinn
Cohesion in English
5,806 Citations2014Μ. Α. Κ. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan
Modern Language JournalStrategies of Discourse Comprehension
5,450 Citations1985John J. Staczek, Teun A. van Dijk +1 more
Computational LinguisticsAttention, intentions, and the structure of discourse
2,606 Citations1986Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner
A new theory of discourse structure that stresses the role of purpose and processing in discourse is explored and various properties of discourse are described, and explanations for the behavior of cue phrases, referring expressions, and interruptions are explored.
English Text: System and structure
1,936 Citations1992James R. Martin
Corpus linguistics investigating language structure and use
1,482 Citations2007Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad +1 more
This work investigates the study of discourse characteristics in corpus-based studies by investigating the use of language features and the characteristics of Varieties in relation to language acquisition and development.
Cambridge University Press eBooksCorpus Linguistics
1,432 Citations1998Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad +1 more
TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages
1,253 Citations1997Marti A. Hearst
The algorithm is fully implemented and is shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the subtopic boundaries of 12 texts, which should be useful for many text analysis tasks, including information retrieval and summarization.
The MIT Press eBooksThe Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization
629 Citations2000Daniel Marcu
This book documents the first serious attempt to construct automatically and use nonsemantic computational structures for text summarization and develops a semantics-free theoretical framework that is both general enough to be applicable to naturally occurring texts and concise enough to facilitate an algorithmic approach to discourse analysis.
The Thread of Discourse
585 Citations1975Joseph E. Grimes
Development and use of a gold-standard data set for subjectivity classifications
498 Citations1999Janyce Wiebe, Rebecca Bruce +1 more
Bias-corrected tags are formulated and successfully used to guide a revision of the coding manual and develop an automatic classifier.
Computational LinguisticsThe reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme
401 Citations1997Jean Carletta, Stephen Isard +4 more
This paper describes the reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme based on utterance function, game structure, and higher-level transaction structure that has been applied to a corpus of spontaneous task-oriented spoken dialogues.
Journal of PragmaticsA formal model of the structure of discourse
386 Citations1988Livia Polanyi
This work takes as its goal development of a set of formally defined robust notions and mechanisms which will eventually be able to assign every clause in a discourse a proper semantic representation, the Linguistic Discourse Model.
Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases
372 Citations1991Julia Hirschberg, Diane Litman
This paper reports results of empirical studies on discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases, in which both text-based and prosodic features were examined for disambiguating power.
Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh)Planning text for advisory dialogues: capturing intentional and rhetorical information
336 Citations1993Johanna D. Moore, Cécile Paris
It is argued that, to handle explanation dialogues successfully, a discourse model must include information about the intended effect of individual parts of the text on the hearer, as well as how the parts relate to one another rhetorically.
Edinburgh Research Archive (University of Edinburgh)A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations
310 Citations1996Alistair Knott
It is argued here that evidence for the constructs modelled by relations can be sought in an analysis of the linguistic resources available for marking them explicitly in text, which rests on a systematic analysis of concrete linguistic data and demands a minimum of theoretical assumptions.
The Grammar of Discourse
309 Citations1995Robert E. Longacre
Artificial IntelligenceAutomated discourse generation using discourse structure relations
308 Citations1993Eduard Hovy
Several facets of discourse structure relations as they are required by and used in text planners are outlined—their nature, number, and extension to associated tasks such as sentence planning and text formatting.
Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora
280 Citations1997Roger Garside, Geoffrey Leech +1 more
IPrA Papers in PragmaticsRhetorical structure theory
267 Citations2015Sandra A. Thompson, William C. Mann
Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization which provides a framework for an analysis of text, and its mechanisms and applications include studies of clause combining, coherence and assertional effects of discourse structure.
Computational LinguisticsDiscourse segmentation by human and automated means
215 Citations1997Rebecca J. Passonneau, Diane Litman
The first part of this paper presents a method for empirically validating multitutterance units referred to as discourse segments, and reports highly significant results of segmentations performed by naive subjects, where a commonsense notion of speaker intention is the segmentation criterion.
Multilingual Topic Detection and Tracking: Successful Research Enabled by Corpora and Evaluation
139 Citations2000Charles L. Wayne
DARPA-sponsored research has made enormous progress during the past three years, and the tasks have been made progressively more difficult and realistic.
Overview of results of the MUC-6 evaluation
127 Citations1995Beth Sundheim
The latest in a series of natural language processing system evaluations, the MUC-6 evaluation entailed Named Entity and Coreference tasks entailed Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) annotation of texts and were being conducted for the first time.
Now let's talk about <i>now</i>
81 Citations1987Julia Hirschberg, Diane Litman
It is proposed that cue and non-cue usage can be distinguished intonationally, on the basis of phrasing and accent.
Experiments in Constructing a Corpus of Discourse Trees
71 Citations1999Daniel Marcu, Estibaliz Amorrortu +1 more
The statistical measure used suggests that annotators can achieve good levels of agreement on the task of determining the high-level, rhetorical structure of texts and that building discourse parsers that incrementally derive correct rhetorical structures of unrestricted texts without applying any form of backtracking is feasible.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence ResearchCue Phrase Classification Using Machine Learning
69 Citations1996Diane Litman
This paper explores the use of machine learning for classifying cue phrases as discourse or sentential in natural language processing systems that exploit discourse structure, e.g., for performing tasks such as anaphora resolution and plan recognition.
The automatic translation of discourse structures
63 Citations2000Daniel Marcu, Lynn Carlson +1 more
A computational model for rewriting discourse structures of Japanese texts is proposed to improve translation quality and learns to rewrite Japanese trees as trees that are closer to the natural English rendering than the original ones.
Investigating cue selection and placement in tutorial discourse
62 Citations1995Megan Moser, Johanna D. Moore
A coding scheme for the exhaustive analysis of discourse allows a systematic evaluation and refinement of hypotheses concerning cues, and a comparison of the distribution of SINCE and BECAUSE in the corpus, and the impact of embeddedness on cue selection are reported.
Towards automatic classification of discourse elements in essays
62 Citations2001Jill Burstein, Daniel Marcu +2 more
Using a relatively small corpus of manually annotated data, this work uses Bayesian classification to identify thesis statements and yields results that are much closer to human performance than the results produced by two baseline systems.
Learning features that predict cue usage
48 Citations1997Barbara Di Eugenio, Johanna D. Moore +1 more
The goal is to identify the features that predict the occurrence and placement of discourse cues in tutorial explanations in order to aid in the automatic generation of explanations, and to show that machine learning can be used to induce decision trees useful for text generation.
Overview of results of the MUC-6 evaluation
44 Citations1996Beth Sundheim
The latest in a series of natural language processing system evaluations was concluded in October 1995 and was the topic of the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) in November, which discussed the evolution and design of the MUC-6 evaluation.
A discourse coding scheme for conversational Spanish
34 Citations1998Lori Levin, Ann Thymé-Gobbel +3 more
This paper describes a 3-level manual discourse coding scheme that is devised for manual tagging of the CallHome Spanish and CallFriend Spanish databases used in the CLARITY project, and presents preliminary results for statement categorization.
Enhancement of a Chinese discourse marker tagger with C4.5
14 Citations2000Benjamin K. Tsou, Tom B. Y. Lai +3 more
Hopes to improve an automatic tagging system which identifies and classifies discourse markers in Chinese texts by applying machine learning to the disambiguation of discourse markers, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorical structure are described.
Domain and genre in sublanguage text: definitional microtexts in three corpora
9 Citations1998Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley, Josette Rebeyrolle
A shallow grammar of definitions as they occur in technical and scientific texts is outlined and it is shown how visual clues, typography and layout, interact with lexical and syntactic clues to signal a definitional text.
Learning Discourse Relations with Active Data Selection
4 Citations1999Tadashi Nomoto, Yūji Matsumoto
A novel method for reducing the amount of data for training a decision tree classifier, while not compromising the accuracy, is presented, built on the committee-based sampling, initially proposed for probabilistic classifiers by Dagan and Engelson (1995), where an example is selected from the corpus according to its utility in improving statistics.