Extracting PDTB Discourse Relations from Student Essays

Abstract

We investigate the manual and automatic annotation of PDTB discourse relations in student essays, a novel domain that is not only learning-based and argumentative, but also noisy with surface errors and deeper coherency issues. We discuss methodological complexities it poses for the task. We present descriptive statistics and compare relation distributions in related corpora. We compare automatic discourse parsing performance to prior work.

Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

“…This was done in two steps. Following Forbes-Riley et al (2016), in the first step, we measured type agreement. Type agreement is defined as the number of common DRs over the number of unique relations, where all discourse relations are of the same type.…”