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<Paper uid="W05-0312">
  <Title>Annotating Discourse Connectives in the Chinese Treebank [?]</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="84" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The goal of the Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) Project is to add a layer of discourse annotation to the Penn Chinese Treebank (Xue et al., To appear), the bulk of which has also been annotated with predicate-argument structures. This project is focused on discourse connectives, which include explicit connectives such as subordinate and coordinate conjunctions, discourse adverbials, as well as implicit discourse connectives that are inferable from neighboring sentences. Like the Penn English Discourse Treebank (Miltsakaki et al., 2004a; Miltsakaki et al., 2004b), the CDTB project adopts the general idea presented in (Webber and Joshi, 1998; Webber et al., 1999; Webber et al., 2003) where discourse connectives are considered to be predicates that take abstract objects such as propositions, events and situations as their arguments. This approach departs from the previous approaches to discourse analysis such as the Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Carlson et al., 2003) in that it does not start from a predefined inventory of abstract discourse relations. Instead, all discourse relations are lexically grounded and anchored by a discourse connective. The discourse relations so defined can be structural or anaphoric.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Structural discourse relations, generally anchored by subordinate and coordinate conjunctions, hold locally between two adjacent units of discourse (such as clauses). In contrast, anaphoric discourse relations are generally anchored by discourse adverbials and only one argument can be identified structurally in the local context while the other can only be de- null rived anaphorically in the previous discourse. An advantage of this approach to discourse analysis is that discourse relations can be built up incrementally in a bottom-up manner and this advantage is magnified in large-scale annotation projects where inter-annotator agreement is crucial and has been verified in the construction of the Penn English Discourse Treebank (Miltsakaki et al., 2004a). This approach closely parallels the annotation of the the verbs in the English and Chinese Propbanks (Palmer et al., 2005; Xue and Palmer, 2003), where verbs are the anchors of predicate-argument structures. The difference is that the extents of the arguments to discourse connectives are far less certain, while the arity of the predcates is fixed for the discourse connectives. null This paper outlines the issues that arise from the annotation of Chinese discourse connectives, with an initial focus on explicit discourse connectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Section 2 gives an overview of the different kinds of discourse connectives that we plan to annotate for the CDTB Project. Section 3 surveys the distribution of the discourse connectives and Section 4 describes the kinds of discourse units that can be arguments to the discourse connectives. Section 5 specifies the scope of the arguments of discourse relations and describes what should be included in or excluded from the text span of the arguments. Sections 6 and 7 describes the need for a mechanism to address sense disambiguation and discourse connective variation, drawing evidence from examples of explicit discourse connectives. Finally, Section 8 concludes this paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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