DiscAn: Towards a Discourse Annotation system for Dutch language corpora or why and how we would want to annotate corpora on the discourse level

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DiscAn Towards a Discourse Annotation system
for Dutch language corporaorwhy and how we
would want to annotate corpora on the discourse
level

• Ted Sanders
• Utrecht institute of Linguistics
• Universiteit Utrecht

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Coherence in discourse

• Many tourists come to Switzerland. They want to
  see the mountains.
• Referential coherence
• Many tourists come to Switzerland because they
  want to see the mountains.
• Relational coherence
• John was happy. It was a Saturday.
• We do not need explicit linguistic indicators

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Coherence in discourse, 2

• Coherence is a cognitive phenomenon
• Coherence relations are conceptual relations that
  constitute coherence between discourse segments
  (minimally clauses)
• Connectives, Cue Phrases and other lexical
  markers can but need not make this coherence
  explicit.
• Coherence relations are the building blocks of
  discourse structure (causal, contrastive,
  additive)

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In annotated corpora ?

• The discourse level is largely lacking in
  annotated Dutch corpora
• There is an international tendency towards
  discourse annotation
• The Penn Discourse Treebank (Prasad, Joshi,
  Webber et al.)
• The Potsdam Corpus (Stede et al.)
• And at the same time, we do have much data on
  Dutch
• on connectives
• Mainly causal
• Across media (various written genres, spoken,
  chat)
• At various stages of annotation

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Larger research issues in the field

• To be answered on the basis of annotated corpora
• The meaning and use of connectives varies across
  languages omdat vs. parce que vs. weil
• Semantic-pragmatic restrictions on use
• Similarities and differences in acquisition
• We will start discourse annotation with a study
  on the category of causals

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Annotation

• Some criteria
• Order cause consequence and vice versa
• Subjectivity want, puisque, since, denn vs.
  omdat parce que, because weil
• Linguistic marking yes/no, perspective etc.
• Characteristics of the segments propositional
  attitude, modality, tense, syntax

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Current situation 15 studies.

• Corpus conn fragmnr s1 s2 modality s1 modality s2
  protags1 s2 relation
• 7 omdat 2502 176 176 1 1
  irrelevant want feit 6 1 1 1 Irrelevant want
  feit Irrelevant want feit 1
• 7 omdat 2502b 177 177 2 1
  Spreker/auteur 6 2 1 1 Expliciet
  aanwezig Irrelevant want feit 1
• 7 omdat 2509 707 707
  1 1 irrelevant want feit 6 1 1 1 Irrelevant want
  feit Irrelevant want feit 1
• 7 omdat 2539 3320 3320
  1 1 irrelevant want feit 6 1 1 1 Irrelevant want
  feit Irrelevant want feit 1
• 7 omdat 2546 3810 3810
  1 2 irrelevant want feit 33 2 3 1 Irrelevant
  want feit Impliciet 19
• 7 omdat 2551 4357 4357
  1 2 irrelevant want feit 31 2 1 1 Irrelevant
  want feit Expliciet aanwezig 1
• 7 omdat 2525 2547 2547
  3 1 Spreker/auteur 6 2 1 1 Expliciet
  aanwezig Irrelevant want feit 1

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The DiscAn project has five main goals

• standardize and open up an existing set of Dutch
  corpus analyses of coherence relations and
  discourse connectives
• develop the foundations for a discourse
  annotation system
• improve the metadata by investigating existing
  CMDI profiles or adding new profiles suited for
  this type of analysis
• inventorize the required categories and
  investigate to what extent these could be
  included in ISOcat categories for discourse
• an interdisciplinary discourse community of
  text-, corpus and computational linguists to
  initiate further research in a European context.

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A model of analysis

• Var 1 Name of the coder (values the names of the
  two authors)
• Var 2 Number of the fragment (the values were
  present in the fragments)
• Var 3 Utterance number(s) of the segment
  preceding want (S1)
• Var 4 Utterance number(s) of the segment
  following want (S2)
• Var 5 Propositional attitude of S1 (values
  action, fact, opinion, observation,
• knowledge, experience)
• Var 6 Propositional attitude of S2 (values
  action, fact, opinion, observation,
• knowledge, experience)
• Var 7 Identity of the conceptualizer in S1
  (values speaker/1st person, second person,
• third person (nominal or pronominal, generic
  person)
• Var 8 Identity of the conceptualizer in S2
  (values speaker/1st person, second person,
• third person (nominal or pronominal, generic
  person)
• Var 9 Type of relation expressed by want (values
  non-volitional content, volitional
• content, explanation of a mental state,
  epistemic, textual, speech act)
• Var 10 Syntactic modification of want (values no
  modification, coordinating
• conjunction, intensifier, focus element)