--- title: "Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken — Demirşahin 2014" description: "This paper reports the first effort to bring PDTB/TDB-style discourse annotation, previously applied only to written Turkish, to spoken Turkish." authors: ["Isin Demirşahin", "Deniz Zeyrek"] year: 2014 venue: "Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W14-4916/" doi: "10.3115/v1/w14-4916" 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/papers/ahin-2014-annotating-discourse-connectives-spoken-turkish/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ahin-2014-annotating-discourse-connectives-spoken-turkish/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2014/) / Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish # Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish **Authors:** Isin Demirşahin, [Deniz Zeyrek](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/deniz-zeyrek/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop · **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/W14-4916/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W14-4916.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/v1/w14-4916](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-4916) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250607491) **Citations:** 33 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [4](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary This paper reports the first effort to bring PDTB/TDB-style discourse annotation, previously applied only to written Turkish, to spoken Turkish. The authors took the 77 search tokens defined for the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) and marked explicit discourse connectives, along with their arguments, in the demo release of the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC). Following TDB practice, they also annotated phrasal expressions such as onun için. To avoid building new software, they loaded the STC transcripts into the existing DATT tool and gave annotators the audio as separate files. This meant the corpus's time alignment went unused. The authors identify several difficulties specific to speech: - pronouns that may refer either to a proposition or to a noun phrase - connectives that pick up a first argument from far back in a dialogue, including a previously unseen interrogative use of için - arguments that are cut off, inaudible or overlapping The annotation yielded 416 relations. Frequencies of the four most common connectives, normalized per 1000 words, showed no statistically significant difference from the TDB. This provides a baseline resource for studying discourse structure in spoken Turkish. ## Key points - **Data:** STC demo has about 20,000 words in 23 recordings (2 h 27 min). Twenty are casual conversations and service encounters (2 h 1 min); three are news-commentary broadcasts (26 min). - **Tools and baseline:** Annotation used DATT (Discourse Annotation Tool for Turkish). The comparison resource, TDB, is built on a 400,000-word subcorpus of the METU Turkish Corpus (MTC). - **Coverage:** ve, için, ama and sonra account for 217 of 416 STC relations (52.2%), versus 4951 of 8484 TDB annotations (58.3%). Ama is notably more frequent in speech (4.61 vs. 2.57 per 1000 words as a connective). - **Statistics:** Chi-square tests found differences in frequency and in the rate of discourse use to be non-significant. The paper reports this as p>0.5. The authors partly attribute the similarity to the TDB containing dialogues and interviews, and to the STC containing scripted broadcasts. - **Future work:** The authors plan to merge the discourse layer with the STC's time-aligned annotation, add a second double-blind annotation set, and compute inter-annotator agreement. *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/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/discourse-analysis/) ## Cited by Cited by 4 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 2 not yet. - [Using a unified taxonomy to annotate discourse markers in speech and writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/crible-2015-unified-taxonomy-annotate-discourse-markers/) - [Annotating Discourse Relations in Spoken Language: A Comparison of the PDTB and CCR Frameworks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rehbein-2016-annotating-discourse-relations-spoken-language/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{demirsahin2014annotating, title = {{Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish}}, author = {Demirşahin, Isin and Zeyrek, Deniz}, booktitle = {Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop}, year = {2014}, doi = {10.3115/v1/w14-4916}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-4916} } ``` - [← previous ANCOR_Centre, a large free spoken French coreference corpus: description of the resource and reliability measures](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/muzerelle-2014-ancor-centre-large-free-spoken/) - [next → Annotation as a New Paradigm in Research Archiving](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/langstream-2014-roorda-annotation-new-paradigm-research-archiving/) - [↑ back to papers of 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2014/) ## References 10 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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