Penn Discourse TreeBank

Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)

The Penn Discourse TreeBank Project is an NSF funded project at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania.

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PDTB 2.0 is now available from the Linguistic Data Consortium.
The corpus is described in the PDTB 2.0 Annotation Manual
Please visit the PDTB API page for technical support.

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Faculty at Penn	Aravind Joshi, Ani Nenkova

Faculty at Edinburgh	Bonnie Webber

Researchers	Rashmi Prasad, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki

Previous and Current Penn Students	Nikhil Dinesh, Geraud Campion Lukasz Abramowicz, John Bell Katherine Forbes, Cassandre Creswell, Jason Teeple, Tom Morton

Previous and Current Staff	Jeremy Lacivita

Annotators	Lukasz Abramowicz, Dan Afergan, Soobia Afroz, Driya Amandita, Alex Channer, Sara Clopton, George Cooper, Cassandre Creswell, Sarah Johnstone, John Laury, Alan Lee, Marielle Lerner, Sophia Malamud, Chris Moulton, Viraj Narayanan, Emily Pawley, Steven Pettington, Sami Saba, Adi Shifir, Sandhya Sundaresan, Nianwen Xue

Abstract: The goal of the PDTB project is to develop a large scale corpus annotated with information related to discourse structure. While there are many aspects of discourse that are crucial to a complete understanding of natural language, the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) focuses on encoding coherence relations associated with discourse connectives. The annotations include the argument structure of the connectives, thus exposing a clearly defined level of discourse structure which will support the extraction of a range of inferences associated with discourse connectives. Some other annotated features associated with discourse connectives and their arguments include sense distinctions for discourse connectives, and attribution-related features for both connectives and their arguments.

The annotations in the PDTB are linked to the Penn Treebank.

The PDTB is targeted to extend the scope of using large scale resources such as the PTB for a wide range of applications, ranging from parsing, information extraction, question-answering, summarization, machine translation, generation systems, as well as corpus based studies in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Since the PDTB will provide a substantial level of discourse structure information, the PDTB, together with the PTB, will raise the bar very substantially with respect to the quality and coverage achieved in the above mentioned applications.

Related Papers and Reports:

2008:
- A Discourse-based Approach to Generating Why-Questions from Texts
  Rashmi Prasad and Aravind Joshi
  To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge
  Arlington, VA, September 2008
- Departures from Tree Structures in Discourse: Shared Arguments in the Penn Discourse Treebank
  Alan Lee, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the Constraints in Discourse III Workshop
  Potsdam, Germany, July-August 2008
- Sentence-Initial Discourse Connectives, Discourse Structure and Semantics
  Bonnie Webber and Rashmi Prasad
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal and Experimental Approaches to Discourse Particles and Modal Adverbs
  Hamburg, Germany, August 2008.
- Easily identifiable discourse relations
  Emily Pitler, Mridhula Raghupathy, Hena Mehta, Ani Nenkova, Alan Lee and Aravind Joshi
  To appear in Proceedings of COLING 2008
  Manchester, UK, August 2008.
- On the Relationship between Grammatical Subordination and Rhetorical Non-Prominence (forthcoming)
  Alan Lee
  Presented at International Conference on Discourse and Grammar(DG 2008)
  Ghent, Belgium, May 2008.
- A Study of Parentheticals in Discourse: Implications for NLG Systems.
  Eva Banik and Alan Lee
  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).
  Marrakech, Morocco. June 2008.
- The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0.
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Livio Robaldo, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
- Sense Annotation in the Penn Discourse Treebank
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Livio Robaldo, Alan Lee and Aravind Joshi
  Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 4919, 2008. pp 275-286.
2007:
- Attribution and its Annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Traitement Automatique des Langues, Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Document and Discourse, Vol.47, n.2.
2006:
- Complexity of Dependencies in Discourse: Are Dependencies in Discourse More Complex Than in Syntax?
  Alan Lee, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Nikhil Dinesh and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Prague, Czech Republic. December 2006
- Accounting for Discourse Relations: Constituency and Dependency
  Bonnie Webber.
  In M. Butt, M. Dalrymple and T. King, Intelligent Linguistic Architectures, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2006, pp. 339-360.
- Discourse Annotation: Discourse Connectives and Discourse Relations
  Aravind Joshi, Rashmi Prasad and Bonnie Webber
  Tutorial at the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, Australia. July 2006.
- Annotating Attribution in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the COLING/ACL Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text, Sydney, Australia. July 2006.
- The Penn Discourse TreeBank 1.0. Annotation Manual
  The PDTB Research Group
  IRCS Technical Report IRCS-06-01, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. March 2006.
2005:
- Experiments on Sense Annotations and Sense Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Nikhil Dinesh, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT2005), Barcelona, Spain. December 2005
- The Penn Discourse TreeBank as a Resource for Natural Language Generation (Slides)
  Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation, Birmingham, U.K. July 2005.
- A Short Introduction to the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, and Kate Forbes
  Copenhagen Working Papers in Language and Speech Processing.
- Attribution and the (Non)-Alignment of Syntactic and Discourse Arguments of Connectives
  Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky. Ann Arbor, Michigan. June 2005.
2004:
- D-LTAG: Extending Lexicalized TAG to Discourse
  Bonnie Webber
  Cognitive Science, 28(5). September 2004.
- Annotation and Data Mining of the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  Rashmi Prasad, Eleni Miltsakaki, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation. Barcelona, Spain. 2004.
- Annotating Discourse Connectives and their Arguments
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  In Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation. Boston, MA. 2004
- The Penn Discourse TreeBank
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Lisbon, Portugal. 2004.
2003:
- Computing Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics
  Bonnie Webber.
  Euro Summer School - Vilem Mathesius Lecture Series 18, Prague 6. March 2003
- Anaphoric Arguments of Discourse Connectives: Semantic Properties of Antecedents versus Non-antecedents
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Cassandre Creswell, Katherine Forbes, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  In Proceedings of the Computational Treatment of Anaphora Workshop, EACL 2003, Budapest. 2003
- D-LTAG System: Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar.
  Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Special Issue: Discourse and Information Structure. Volume 12 (3). 2003
- Anaphora and Discourse Structure
  Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Matthew Stone, and Alistair Knott.
  Computational Linguistics 29(4). pp. 545-587. 2003
2002:
- The Discourse Anaphoric Properties of Connectives
  Cassandre Cresswell, Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC). 2002
- A Semantic Account of Adverbials as Discourse Connectives
  Katherine Forbes and Bonnie Webber.
  3rd SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Philadelphia PA. July 2002
2001:
- D-LTAG System: Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar.
  Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber.
  ESSLLI 2001 Workshop on "Information Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics. 2001
1999:
- What are Little Texts Made of? A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalised TAG
  Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone and Aravind Joshi.
  International Workshop on Levels of Representation in Discourse (LORID'99), University of Edinburgh. July 1999
- Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account using Lexicalised TAG
  Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone and Aravind Joshi.
  Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park MD. June 1999
- Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar for Discourse
  Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott and Aravind Joshi.
  Third International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands. January 1999
1998:
- Anchoring a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining grammar for Discourse
  Bonnie Webber and Aravind Joshi.
  ACL/COLING Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers, Montreal, Canada. August 1998.

pdtb-request@linc.cis.upenn.edu

Last modified: April 3, 2008