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<Paper uid="W05-0305">
  <Title>Attribution and the (Non-)Alignment of Syntactic and Discourse Arguments of Connectives</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The overall goal of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) is to annotate the million word WSJ corpus in the Penn TreeBank (Marcus et al., 1993) with a layer of discourse annotations. A preliminary report on this project was presented at the 2004 workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation (Miltsakaki et al., 2004a), where we described our annotation of discourse connectives (both explicit and implicit) along with their (clausal) arguments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Further work done since then includes the annotation of attribution: that is, who has expressed each argument to a discourse connective (the writer or some other speaker or author) and who has expressed the discourse relation itself. These ascriptions need not be the same. Of particular interest is the fact that attribution may or may not play a role in the relation established by a connective. This may lead to a lack of congruence between arguments at the syntactic and the discourse levels. The issue of congruence is of interest both from the perspective of annotation (where it means that, even within a single sentence, one cannot merely transfer the annotation of syntactic arguments of a subordinate or coordinate conjunction to its discourse arguments), and from the perspective of inferences that these annotations will support in future applications of the PDTB.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The paper is organized as follows. We give a brief overview of the annotation of connectives and their arguments in the PDTB in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe the annotation of the attribution of the arguments of a connective and the relation it conveys. In Sections 4 and 5, we describe mismatches that arise between the discourse arguments of a connective and the syntactic annotation as provided by the Penn TreeBank (PTB), in the cases where all the arguments of the connective are in the same sentence. In Section 6, we will discuss some implications of these issues for the theory and practice of discourse annotation and their relevance even at the level of sentence-bound annotation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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