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# The Penn Discourse Treebank

**Authors:** [Eleni Miltsakaki](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/eleni-miltsakaki/), [Rashmi Prasad](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/rashmi-prasad/), [Aravind Joshi](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/aravind-joshi/), [Bonnie Webber](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/bonnie-webber/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L04-1386](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1386/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**108** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/miltsakaki-2004-penn-discourse-treebank/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L04-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1386/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1386.pdf)

**Authors (4)**

1. Eleni Miltsakaki
2. Rashmi Prasad
3. Aravind Joshi
4. Bonnie Webber

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper introduces the PDTB project. It adds a discourse layer to the Penn Treebank and Propbank: discourse connectives, their two arguments (Arg1 and Arg2), and, for implicit relations, an inserted connective. Connectives are of four kinds: subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, adverbials, and implicit ones. The paper reports a pilot. Two annotators marked 2,717 tokens of 10 explicit connectives and 386 implicit tokens. For the argument spans of explicit connectives, exact-match agreement is 90.2% (4,900 of 5,434 argument tokens). It is 92.4% for subordinating conjunctions and 71.8% for adverbials. Of the disagreements, 79% are partial overlaps, mostly over a governing verb, a dependent clause or a parenthetical. For implicit connectives, argument agreement is 85.1% (657 of 772 tokens), and agreement on the class of the inserted connective is 72% (307 tokens). The authors do not use kappa, because the spans do not fall into fixed categories.

## Ideas

- I1. Report two agreement numbers for any Mova annotation: exact span and partial overlap. The paper's partial-match figure (94.5%) shows how much the choice of measure changes the result.
- I2. Store each argument as a minimal span and a separate supplementary span. A rule can then use the minimal span for sense and the full span for retrieval. The same split fits the frames in `prag/src/frames.rs`.
- I3. Use five coarse classes for inserted connectives (additive, cause-effect, temporal, contrast, restatement), as the paper does, and measure agreement on the same kind of sample.
- I4. Report the adverbial and subordinating classes apart. The gap in the paper (92.4% vs 71.8%) shows where a rule-based argument finder is likely to fail, and the same split can be measured on Mova's output.

## For Mova

The chapters are [36. Discourse relations and coherence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/36-discourse-relations/) and [38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/). The code is `prag/src/frames.rs`. The measure is a two-annotator agreement check on a sample of Mova's own lesson annotations, with the two span measures and the per-class split above. Run it twice. The paper is a 2004 pilot with small counts, so the numbers are a guide, not a target.

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{miltsakaki2004penn,
  title = {{The Penn Discourse Treebank}},
  author = {Miltsakaki, Eleni and Prasad, Rashmi and Joshi, Aravind and Webber, Bonnie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04)},
  year = {2004},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L04-1386/}
}
```

- [← previous Causation (and Some Other) Paraphrasing Patterns in L1 English. A Case Study](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/milicevic-2021-causation-some-other-paraphrasing-patterns/)
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- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

11 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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2. Carlson, Lynn, Daniel Marcu, and Mary Ellen Okurowski, 2003. Current Directions in Discourse and Dialogue, chapter Building a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Kluwer Academic Publishers. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Carlson%2C+Lynn%2C+Daniel+Marcu%2C+and+Mary+Ellen+Okurowski%2C+2003%2E+Current+Directions+in+Discourse+and+Dialogue%2C+chapter+Building+a+Discourse%2DTagged+Corpus+in+the+Framework+of+Rhetorical+Structure+Theory%2E+K) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/carlson-2001-building-discourse-tagged-corpus-framework/)
3. Gaizauskas, Rob, Patrick Hanks, James Pustejovsky, Roser Sauri, Andrew See, Andrea Setzer, Lisa Ferro, and Beth Sundheim., 2003. The timebank corpus. In Corpus Linguistics 2003.. Lancaster, U.K. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Gaizauskas%2C+Rob%2C+Patrick+Hanks%2C+James+Pustejovsky%2C+Roser+Sauri%2C+Andrew+See%2C+Andrea+Setzer%2C+Lisa+Ferro%2C+and+Beth+Sundheim%2E%2C+2003%2E+The+timebank+corpus%2E+In+Corpus+Linguistics+2003%2E%2E+Lancaster%2C+U%2EK%2E)
4. Kingsbury, Paul and Martha Palmer, 2002. From Treebank to Propbank. In Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-02, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kingsbury%2C+Paul+and+Martha+Palmer%2C+2002%2E+From+Treebank+to+Propbank%2E+In+Third+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation%2C+LREC%2D02%2C+Las+Palmas%2C+Canary+Islands%2C+Spain%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/kingsbury-2002-treebank-propbank/)
5. Knott, Alistair, 1996. A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Knott%2C+Alistair%2C+1996%2E+A+Data%2DDriven+Methodology+for+Motivating+a+Set+of+Coherence+Relations%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+University+of+Edinburgh%2E)
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7. Miltsakaki, Eleni, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber, 2004. Annotating discourse connectives and their arguments. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation. Boston, Massachussetts. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Miltsakaki%2C+Eleni%2C+Rashmi+Prasad%2C+Aravind+Joshi%2C+and+Bonnie+Webber%2C+2004%2E+Annotating+discourse+connectives+and+their+arguments%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Workshop+on+Frontiers+in+Corpus+Annotation%2E+Boston)
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