Abstract
The Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) is a resource of approximately 400,000 words in its current release in which explicit discourse connectives and phrasal expressions are annotated along with the textual spans they relate. The corpus has been annotated by annotators using a semiautomatic annotation tool. We expect that it will enable researchers to study aspects of language beyond the sentence level. The TDB follows the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) in adopting a connective-based annotation for discourse. The connectives are considered heads of annotated discourse relations. We have so far found only applicative structures in Turkish discourse, which, unlike syntactic heads, seem to have no need for composition. Interleaving in-text spans of arguments appears to be only apparently-crossing, and related to information structure.
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Notes
- 1.
The tools and the data are available to researchers free of charge by applying to the TDB research team through medid.ii.metu.edu.tr (Accessed Sept. 14, 2017).
- 2.
The connectives that gave low κ values are amaçla “for this purpose”, ayrıca “in addition/separately”, dolayısıyla “in consequence of”, fakat “but”, oysa “however”, rağmen “despite/despite this”, tersine “in contrast”, and yandan “on the one hand/on the other hand”.
- 3.
Of the 7,486 ve “and” tokens in the TDB, 2,111 are annotated as discourse connectives.
- 4.
The disagreed text spans are rendered in both italics and boldface.
- 5.
Here we follow Forbes-Riley et al. (2006) who argue that discourse adverbials and other connectives such as coordinating and subordinating conjunctions differ in how they take their arguments. Discourse adverbials only take their second argument structurally, their first argument being anaphoric. Other kinds of discourse connectives take both of their arguments structurally. Thus, we use the term “structural discourse connective” for coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, “anaphoric discourse connective” for discourse adverbials as well as expressions that contain a deictic anaphor (i.e., phrasal expressions).
- 6.
Indices show argument-taking.
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Zeyrek, D., Demirşahin, I., Bozşahin, C. (2018). Turkish Discourse Bank: Connectives and Their Configurations. In: Oflazer, K., Saraçlar, M. (eds) Turkish Natural Language Processing. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90165-7_16
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