Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres

TL;DR

This paper extends discourse relation signaling analysis beyond news to multiple genres, identifying and comparing various textual signals and providing a taxonomy across different text types.

Contribution

It adapts a signaling scheme to three new genres, analyzes signal distribution, and develops a taxonomy of discourse signals across genres.

Findings

Signaling devices vary significantly across genres

A new taxonomy of discourse signals is proposed

Distribution of signals differs by relation type

Abstract

Recent research on discourse relations has found that they are cued not only by discourse markers (DMs) but also by other textual signals and that signaling information is indicative of genres. While several corpora exist with discourse relation signaling information such as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008) and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Signalling Corpus (RST-SC, Das and Taboada 2018), they both annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al. 1993), which is limited to the news domain. Thus, this paper adapts the signal identification and anchoring scheme (Liu and Zeldes, 2019) to three more genres, examines the distribution of signaling devices across relations and genres, and provides a taxonomy of indicative signals found in this dataset.