Building Chinese Discourse Corpus with Connective-driven Dependency Tree Structure

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree structure and the rhetorical relation of a discourse, while the nuclei of discourse units are globally determined with reference to the dependency theory. Guided by the CDT scheme, we manually annotate a Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) of 500 documents. Preliminary evaluation justifies the appropriateness of the CDT scheme to Chinese discourse analysis and the usefulness of our manually annotated CDTB corpus.