Contrast and comparison relations in RST framework

P. 714–727.

Toldova S., Davydova T., Kobozeva M., Pisarevskaya D.

The paper is devoted to a corpus study of the Contrast relation between discourse units in Russian. It is based on the data of the Ru-RSTreebank annotated within the framework of the Rhetorical Structure theory [Mann, Thompson 1988]. The research question is what cue phrases and lexical and grammatical patterns are used to express the Contrast relation as opposed to the Comparison relation. Since the simple connectives such as conjunctions а or no “but” and others are ambiguous it may be useful to single out specific cues for the Contrast relation and to find other linguistic features that can also help to differentiate Contrast and other relations, such as Comparison. The investigation of cues signalling different types of relations is an important issue for both automatic discourse mining and the theoretical researches of text coherence. We test several hypotheses presented in the reference literature on Russian against corpus data.

Keywords: corpus annotation, дискурсивный анализ, rhetorical structure theory, дискурсивные маркеры, теория риторических структур, discourse connectives, корпусная разметка, Automated Discourse Analysis

In book

Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies Papers from the Annual International Conference “Dialogue” (2019)

Issue 18. , M.: Russian State University for the Humanitie, 2019.