Alan Lee


2019

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Ambiguity in Explicit Discourse Connectives
Bonnie Webber | Rashmi Prasad | Alan Lee
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers

Discourse connectives are known to be subject to both usage and sense ambiguity, as has already been discussed in the literature. But discourse connectives are no different from other linguistic expressions in being subject to other types of ambiguity as well. Four are illustrated and discussed here.

2018

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Discourse Annotation in the PDTB: The Next Generation
Rashmi Prasad | Bonnie Webber | Alan Lee
Proceedings of the 14th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

2017

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Towards Full Text Shallow Discourse Relation Annotation: Experiments with Cross-Paragraph Implicit Relations in the PDTB
Rashmi Prasad | Katherine Forbes Riley | Alan Lee
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Full text discourse parsing relies on texts comprehensively annotated with discourse relations. To this end, we address a significant gap in the inter-sentential discourse relations annotated in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), namely the class of cross-paragraph implicit relations, which account for 30% of inter-sentential relations in the corpus. We present our annotation study to explore the incidence rate of adjacent vs. non-adjacent implicit relations in cross-paragraph contexts, and the relative degree of difficulty in annotating them. Our experiments show a high incidence of non-adjacent relations that are difficult to annotate reliably, suggesting the practicality of backing off from their annotation to reduce noise for corpus-based studies. Our resulting guidelines follow the PDTB adjacency constraint for implicits while employing an underspecified representation of non-adjacent implicits, and yield 62% inter-annotator agreement on this task.

2016

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A Discourse-Annotated Corpus of Conjoined VPs
Bonnie Webber | Rashmi Prasad | Alan Lee | Aravind Joshi
Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016)

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Annotating Discourse Relations with the PDTB Annotator
Alan Lee | Rashmi Prasad | Bonnie Webber | Aravind K. Joshi
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

The PDTB Annotator is a tool for annotating and adjudicating discourse relations based on the annotation framework of the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB). This demo describes the benefits of using the PDTB Annotator, gives an overview of the PDTB Framework and discusses the tool’s features, setup requirements and how it can also be used for adjudication.

2015

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Bridging Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics through Clausal Adjuncts
Rashmi Prasad | Bonnie Webber | Alan Lee | Sameer Pradhan | Aravind Joshi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

2008

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A Pilot Annotation to Investigate Discourse Connectivity in Biomedical Text
Hong Yu | Nadya Frid | Susan McRoy | Rashmi Prasad | Alan Lee | Aravind Joshi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing

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The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0.
Rashmi Prasad | Nikhil Dinesh | Alan Lee | Eleni Miltsakaki | Livio Robaldo | Aravind Joshi | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

We present the second version of the Penn Discourse Treebank, PDTB-2.0, describing its lexically-grounded annotations of discourse relations and their two abstract object arguments over the 1 million word Wall Street Journal corpus. We describe all aspects of the annotation, including (a) the argument structure of discourse relations, (b) the sense annotation of the relations, and (c) the attribution of discourse relations and each of their arguments. We list the differences between PDTB-1.0 and PDTB-2.0. We present representative statistics for several aspects of the annotation in the corpus.

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A Study of Parentheticals in Discourse Corpora - Implications for NLG Systems
Eva Banik | Alan Lee
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper presents a corpus study of parenthetical constructions in two different corpora: the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, (PDTBGroup, 2008)) and the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2001). The motivation for the study is to gain a better understanding of the rhetorical properties of parentheticals in order to enable a natural language generation system to produce parentheticals as part of a rhetorically well-formed output. We argue that there is a correlation between syntactic and rhetorical types of parentheticals and establish two main categories: ELABORATION/EXPANSION-type NP-modifier parentheticals and NON-ELABORATION/EXPANSION-type VP- or S-modifier parentheticals. We show several strategies for extracting these from the two corpora and discuss how the seemingly contradictory results obtained can be reconciled in light of the rhetorical and syntactic properties of parentheticals as well as the decisions taken in the annotation guidelines.

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Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations
Emily Pitler | Mridhula Raghupathy | Hena Mehta | Ani Nenkova | Alan Lee | Aravind Joshi
Coling 2008: Companion volume: Posters

2006

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Attribution and its annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
Rashmi Prasad | Nikhil Dinesh | Alan Lee | Aravind Joshi | Bonnie Webber
Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 47, Numéro 2 : Discours et document : traitements automatiques [Computational Approaches to Discourse and Document Processing]

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Annotating Attribution in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
Rashmi Prasad | Nikhil Dinesh | Alan Lee | Aravind Joshi | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text

2005

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Attribution and the (Non-)Alignment of Syntactic and Discourse Arguments of Connectives
Nikhil Dinesh | Alan Lee | Eleni Miltsakaki | Rashmi Prasad | Aravind Joshi | Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotations II: Pie in the Sky