The Use of Referential Constraints in Structuring Discourse

The quality of discourse structure annotations is negatively influenced by the numerous difficulties that occur in the analysis process. In contrast, referential annotation resources are considerably more reliable, given the high precision of the existent anaphora resolution systems. We present an approach based on the Veins Theory (Cristea, Ide, Romary, 1998), in which successful reference annotations of texts are exploited in order to improve arbitrary structural analyses; in this way, the large amount of corpora annotated at reference level can be used for the acquisition of discourse structure annotation resources.

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