Abstract
In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree structure and the rhetorical relation of a discourse, while the nuclei of discourse units are globally determined with reference to the dependency theory. Guided by the CDT scheme, we manually annotate a Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) of 500 documents. Preliminary evaluation justifies the appropriateness of the CDT scheme to Chinese discourse analysis and the usefulness of our manually annotated CDTB corpus.
Highlights
It is well-known that interpretation of a text requires understanding of its rhetorical relation hierarchy since discourse units rarely exist in isolation
We present a Connective-driven Dependency Tree (CDT) discourse representation scheme, which takes advantage of both Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes
With reference to various theories and representation scheme on the tree structure and nuclearity of RST, the connective, relation and discourse structure of Chinese complex sentence (Xing, 2001), the sentence-group theory (Cao, 1984), the connective treatment of PDTB, the conjunction dependent analysis (Feng and Ji, 2011) and the center theory of dependency grammar (Hays, 1964), we propose a new discourse representation scheme for Chinese, called Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT), with elementary discourse units (EDUs) as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, to accommodate the special characteristics of the Chinese language in discourse structure
Summary
It is well-known that interpretation of a text requires understanding of its rhetorical relation hierarchy since discourse units rarely exist in isolation. The Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson, 1988) represents a discourse as a tree with phrases or clauses as elementary discourse units (EDUs). As a connective and its arguments are determined in a local contextual window, it is normally difficult to deduce a complete discourse structure from such a connective-argument scheme. We attempt to propose a new scheme to Chinese discourse structure, adopt advantages of the tree structure from RST and connective from PDTB. Previous studies have shown the difference in classifying Chinese discourse relations from English (Xing, 2001; Huang and Liao, 2011). We present a Connective-driven Dependency Tree (CDT) discourse representation scheme, which takes advantage of both RST and PDTB, with elementary discourse units (limited to clauses) as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes.
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