The RST Continuity Corpus

We present the RST Continuity Corpus (RST-CC), a corpus of discourse relations annotated for continuity dimensions. Continuity or discontinuity (maintaining or shifting deictic centres across discourse segments) is an important property of discourse relations, but the two are correlated in greatly varying ways. To analyse this correlation, the relations in the RST-CC are annotated using operationalised versions of Givón’s (1993) continuity dimensions. We also report on the inter-annotator agreement, and discuss recurrent annotation issues. First results show substantial variation of continuity dimensions within and across relation types.

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