A Study of Parentheticals in Discourse Corpora - Implications for NLG Systems

Eva Banik, Alan Lee


Abstract
This paper presents a corpus study of parenthetical constructions in two different corpora: the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, (PDTBGroup, 2008)) and the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2001). The motivation for the study is to gain a better understanding of the rhetorical properties of parentheticals in order to enable a natural language generation system to produce parentheticals as part of a rhetorically well-formed output. We argue that there is a correlation between syntactic and rhetorical types of parentheticals and establish two main categories: ELABORATION/EXPANSION-type NP-modifier parentheticals and NON-ELABORATION/EXPANSION-type VP- or S-modifier parentheticals. We show several strategies for extracting these from the two corpora and discuss how the seemingly contradictory results obtained can be reconciled in light of the rhetorical and syntactic properties of parentheticals as well as the decisions taken in the annotation guidelines.
Anthology ID:
L08-1459
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/663_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eva Banik and Alan Lee. 2008. A Study of Parentheticals in Discourse Corpora - Implications for NLG Systems. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Study of Parentheticals in Discourse Corpora - Implications for NLG Systems (Banik & Lee, LREC 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/663_paper.pdf