Magdaléna Rysová

Use of Coreference in Automatic Searching for Multiword Discourse Markers in the Prague Dependency Treebank

The paper introduces a possibility of new research offered by a multi-dimensional annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank. It focuses on exploitation of the annotation of coreference for the annotation of discourse relations expressed by multiword expressions. It tries to find which aspect interlinks these linguistic areas and how we can use this interplay in automatic searching for Czech expressions like despite this (navzdory tomu ), because of this fact (diky teto skutecnosti ) functioning as multiword discourse markers.

Introducing EVALD - Software Applications for Automatic Evaluation of Discourse in Czech.

In the paper, we introduce two software applications for automatic evaluation of coherence in Czech texts called EVALD – Evaluator of Discourse. The first one – EVALD 1.0 – evaluates texts written by native speakers of Czech on a five-step scale commonly used at Czech schools (grade 1 is the best, grade 5 is the worst). The second application is EVALD 1.0 for Foreigners assessing texts by non-native speakers of Czech using six-step scale (A1–C2) according to CEFR. Both appli-cations are available online at https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/evald-foreign/.

CzeDLex – A Lexicon of Czech Discourse Connectives

Abstract CzeDLex is a new electronic lexicon of Czech discourse connectives, planned for publication by the end of this year. Its data format and structure are based on a study of similar existing resources, and adjusted to comply with the Czech syntactic tradition and specifics and with the Prague approach to the annotation of semantic discourse relations in text. In the article, we first put the lexicon in context of related resources and discuss theoretical aspects of building the lexicon – we present arguments for our choice of the data structure and for selecting features of the lexicon entries, while special attention is paid to a consistent and (as far as possible) uniform encoding of both primary (such as in English because, therefore) and secondary connectives (e.g. for this reason, this is the reason why). The main principle adopted for nesting entries in the lexicon is – apart from the lexical form of the connective – a discoursesemantic type (sense) expressed by the given connective, which enables us to deal with a broad formal variability of connectives and is convenient for interlinking CzeDLex with lexicons in other languages. Second, we introduce the chosen technical solution based on the Prague Markup Language, which allows for an efficient incorporation of the lexicon into the family of Prague treebanks – it can be directly opened and edited in the tree editor TrEd, processed from the command line in btred, interlinked with its source corpus and queried in the PML Tree Query engine. Third, we describe the process of getting data for the lexicon by exploiting a large corpus manually annotated with discourse relations – the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0: we elaborate on the automatic extraction part, post-extraction checks and manual addition of supplementary linguistic information.

Incorporating Coreference to Automatic Evaluation of Coherence in Essays

The paper contributes to the task of automated evaluation of surface coherence. It introduces a coreference-related extension to the EVALD applications, which aim at evaluating essays produced by native and non-native students learning Czech. Having successfully employed the coreference resolver and coreference-related features, our system outperforms the original EVALD approaches by up to 8% points. The paper also introduces a dataset for non-native speakers’ evaluation, which was collected from multiple corpora and the parts with missing annotation of coherence grade were manually judged. The resulting corpora contains sufficient number of examples for each of the grading levels.

Analyzing Text Coherence via Multiple Annotation in the Prague Dependency Treebank

Corpus-based research demonstrates an existence of a mutual interaction of bridging anaphoric relations in the text and sentence information structure. The research is carried out on large corpus data of the Prague Dependency Treebank 3.0 that contains almost 50 thousand sentences with manual annotation of both sentence information structure and bridging anaphora. We investigate in which way the bridging anaphora relations interconnect contextually bound and non-bound sentence items and how such types of connections contribute to the text coherence.