CI: ADDO-EN: Significant Enhancement of the Exisitng Penn Discourse Treebank

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Building large scale annotated resources is crucial for basic and applied research in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our major long term goal of this project is to make very substantial extensions to an existing unique resource, the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), developed under prior NSF support, augmenting it with a variety of new annotations as well as refining earlier annotations. Our proposed work involves conducting some new annotations and some pilot experiments to confirm the strategies for augmentation. A further goal is to bring together a cross section of potential users of this resource, first to acquaint them with the potential of this resource as well as to get their feedback for guiding further augmentations. Applications of PDTB for the task of summarization have already been made. Future applications are in the areas of information extraction, question-generation, and machine translation among others. On the theoretical side, our resource will prove useful in increased theoretical understanding of discourse structure of language.