SIGdial 2013

14th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Expressivity and comparison of models of discourse structure

Antoine Venant, Nicholas Asher, Philippe Muller, Pascal Denis, Stergos Afantenos

Several discourse annotated corpora now exist for NLP. But they use different, not easily comparable annotation schemes: are the structures these schemes describe incompatible, incomparable, or do they share interpretations? In this paper, we relate three types of discourse annotation used in corpora or discourse parsing: (i) RST, (ii) SDRT, and (iii) dependency tree structures. We offer a common language in which their structures can be defined and furnished a range of interpretations. We define translations between RST and DT preserving these interpretations, and introduce a similarity measure for discourse representations in these frameworks. This will enable researchers to exploit different types of discourse annotated data for automated tasks.