Annotating Discourse Connectives and Their Arguments

Eleni Miltsakaki, Aravind K. Joshi, Rashmi Prasad, Bonnie L. Webber

Abstract: This paper describes a new, large scale discourse-level annotation project – the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB). We present an approach to annotating a level of discourse structure that is based on identifying discourse connectives and their arguments. The PDTB is being built directly on top of the Penn TreeBank and Propbank, thus supporting the extraction of useful syntactic and semantic features and providing a richer substrate for the development and evaluation of practical algorithms. We provide a detailed preliminary analysis of inter-annotator agreement – both the level of agreement and the types of inter-annotator variation.