Topic-Chain-Based Coherence Annotation Scheme for Chinese Text

There are few explicit discourse connectives in Chinese texts,which bring in new challenge for the traditional connective-grounded coherence annotation scheme.The paper proposes a new idea to deal with the problem.We introduce topic chain(TC)as a main coherence representation and design several topic-comment relations to describe the complex event relations among TC-linked sentences.Therefore,a new coherence annotation scheme based on TCs and connectives are built accordingly.The tentative confirmatory experiments on the Tsinghua Chinese Treebank(TCT)data set show that more than 76%and 50% Chinese complex sentences have TCs and connectives respectively.They can co-occur in most Chinese sentences.The phenomena verify the feasibility and availability of this scheme.