Deniz Zeyrek

Annotating Subordinators in the Turkish Discourse Bank

In this paper we explain how we annotated subordinators in the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB), an effort that started in 2007 and is still continuing. We introduce the project and describe some of the issues that were important in annotating three subordinators, namely karsin, ragmen and halde, all of which encode the coherence relation Contrast-Concession. We also describe the annotation tool.

Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish

In an attempt to extend Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) / Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) style annotations to spoken Turkish, this paper presents the first attempt at annotating the explicit discourse connectives in the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC) demo version. We present the data and the method for the annotation. Then we reflect on the issues and challenges of transitioning from written to spoken language. We present the preliminary findings suggesting that the distribution of the search tokens and their use as discourse connectives are similar in the TDB and the STC demo.

TDB 1.1: Extensions on Turkish Discourse Bank.

This paper presents the recent developments on Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). First, the resource is summarized and an evaluation is presented. Then, TDB 1.1, i.e. enrichments on 10% of the corpus are described (namely, senses for explicit discourse connectives, and new annotations for three discourse relation types - implicit relations, entity relations and alternative lexicalizations). The method of annotation is explained and the data are evaluated.

Turkish Discourse Bank: Connectives and Their Configurations

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.

Pair Annotation as a Novel Annotation Procedure: The Case of Turkish Discourse Bank

In this chapter, we provide an overview of Turkish Discourse Bank, a resource of \(\sim \)400,000 words built on a sub-corpus of the 2-million-word METU Turkish Corpus annotated following the principles of Penn Discourse Tree Bank. We first present the annotation framework we adopted, explaining how it differs from the annotation of the original language, English. Then we focus on a novel annotation procedure that we have devised and named pair annotation after pair programming. We discuss the advantages it has offered as well as its potential drawbacks.