---
title: "Semi-Automatic Annotation of Intra-Sentential — Jínová 2012"
description: "The paper explains how discourse relations inside sentences, signalled by explicit connectives, were added to the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.5 (PDT)."
authors: ["Pavlína Jínová", "Jiří Mírovský", "Lucie Poláková"]
year: 2012
venue: "Proceedings of the Workshop on Advances in Discourse Analysis and its Computational Aspects"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W12-4704/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/jinova-2012-semi-automatic-annotation-intra-sentential/"
---
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# Semi-Automatic Annotation of Intra-Sentential Discourse Relations in PDT

**Authors:** [Pavlína Jínová](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/pavlina-jinova/), [Jiří Mírovský](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jiri-mirovsku/), [Lucie Poláková](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/lucie-polakova/) · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Workshop on Advances in Discourse Analysis and its Computational Aspects · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W12-4704/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W12-4704.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251589019)

**Citations:** 6 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [7](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper explains how discourse relations inside sentences, signalled by explicit connectives, were added to the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.5 (PDT). PDT is a Czech journalistic treebank with deep-syntax (tectogrammatical) annotation. Most discourse corpora are built on raw text, but the Czech project places discourse links directly on tectogrammatical trees.

A first, largely manual phase covered inter-sentential relations. It also covered intra-sentential cases where the functor did not reliably indicate the discourse sense. In the second phase, a script went through every tree and converted the remaining clause-level dependencies into discourse relations:
- Finite verbs with causal, conditional, concessive and similar functors became vertical (subordinate) relations.
- Coordination nodes joining clauses became horizontal relations.

The script derived discourse type, arrow direction, argument positions and connective from the existing annotation. Temporal clauses were first classified by a human and then processed automatically. A few problematic constructions were corrected by hand afterward.

The work shows that deep-syntax annotation predicts discourse structure well enough to automate most intra-sentential annotation. The resulting resource was released openly.

## Key points
- Every count reported is based on PDT's training section together with its development-test section (43,955 sentences, about 9/10 of the treebank). The evaluation test portion was kept largely unobserved.
- PDT contains 18,187 annotated discourse relations in total: 12,673 intra-sentential and 5,514 inter-sentential (all manual).
- 9,991 relations were created fully automatically (2,599 vertical, 7,392 horizontal). Another 491 temporal relations were semi-automatic, and 2,191 intra-sentential ones (510 vertical, 1,681 horizontal) were manual.
- Functors used for automatic detection:
  - Vertical relations: CAUS, COND, CNCS, AIM, CONTRD, SUBS.
  - Horizontal relations: REAS, CSQ, ADVS, CONFR, GRAD, CONJ, DISJ.
  - Remaining ADVS cases defaulted to opposition.
- Post-correction involved fixing atypical connectives in 23 cases and manually adding 146 clauses tied to complex predicates. The data were published in 2012 under a Creative Commons licence via LINDAT-Clarin.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/)

## Cited by

Cited by

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

- [Introducing the Prague Discourse Treebank 1.0](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/polakova-2013-introducing-prague-discourse-treebank-1/)
- [Reflections on the Penn Discourse TreeBank, Comparable Corpora, and Complementary Annotation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/prasad-2014-reflections-penn-discourse-treebank-comparable/)
- [Announcing the Prague Discourse Treebank 3.0](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/synkova-2024-announcing-prague-discourse-treebank-3/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{jinova2012semi,
  title = {{Semi-Automatic Annotation of Intra-Sentential Discourse Relations in PDT}},
  author = {Jínová, Pavlína and Mírovský, Jiří and Poláková, Lucie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Advances in Discourse Analysis and its Computational Aspects},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W12-4704/}
}
```

- [← previous SemEval-2012 Task 7: Choice of Plausible Alternatives: An Evaluation of Commonsense Causal Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gordon-2012-semeval-2012-task-7-choice/)
- [next → Sentence Boundary Detection: A Long Solved Problem?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2012-read-sentence-boundary-detection-long-solved/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2012](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2012/)

## References

13 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Al-Saif, A; Markert, K. (2010). The Leeds Arabic Discourse Treebank: Annotating discourse connectives for Arabic. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), Valletta, Malta, pp. 2046–2053. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Al%2DSaif%2C+A%3B+Markert%2C+K%2E+%282010%29%2E+The+Leeds+Arabic+Discourse+Treebank%3A+Annotating+discourse+connectives+for+Arabic%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+7th+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and+Evaluatio) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/saif-2010-leeds-arabic-discourse-treebank-annotating/)
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