How consistent are our discourse annotations? Insights from mapping RST-DT and PDTB annotations

Discourse-annotated corpora are an important resource for the community. However, these corpora are often annotated according to different frameworks, making comparison of the annotations difficult. This is unfortunate, since mapping the existing annotations would result in more (training) data for researchers in automatic discourse relation processing and researchers in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In this article, we present an effort to map two large corpora onto each other: the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank. We first propose a method for aligning the discourse segments, and then evaluate the observed against the expected mappings for explicit and implicit relations separately. We find that while agreement on explicit relations is reasonable, agreement between the frameworks on implicit relations is astonishingly low. We identify sources of systematic discrepancies between the two annotation schemes; many of the differences in annotation can be traced back to different operationalizations and goals of the PDTB and RST frameworks. We discuss the consequences of these discrepancies for future annotation, and the usability of the mapped data for theoretical studies and the training of automatic discourse relation labellers.