DiSeg 1.0: The first system for Spanish discourse segmentation

Abstract

Nowadays discourse parsing is a very prominent research topic. However, there is not a discourse parser for Spanish texts. The first stage in order to develop this tool is discourse segmentation. In this work, we present DiSeg, the first discourse segmenter for Spanish, which uses the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory and is based on lexical and syntactic rules. We describe the system and we evaluate its performance against a gold standard corpus, divided in a medical and a terminological subcorpus. We obtain promising results, which means that discourse segmentation is possible using shallow parsing.