---
title: "Annotating Information Structure in a Corpus — Paggio 2006"
description: "This work adds an information structure layer to DanPASS, a spoken Danish corpus whose existing annotation already included transcriptions at both the…"
authors: ["Patrizia Paggio"]
year: 2006
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L06-1395/"
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/paggio-2006-annotating-information-structure-corpus-spoken/"
---
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# Annotating Information Structure in a Corpus of Spoken Danish

**Authors:** Patrizia Paggio · **Year:** 2006 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06) · **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/L06-1395/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L06-1395.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2756905934)

**Citations:** 54 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [7](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
This work adds an information structure layer to DanPASS, a spoken Danish corpus whose existing annotation already included transcriptions at both the orthographic and phonetic levels, along with pause marking, phonetic phrase boundaries and PoS tags. The layer covers 54 monologues by 18 speakers. The annotation follows Lambrecht's framework. Focus (non-presupposed content) and, where present, topic (identified with Reinhart's "What about X" test) are marked word by word with F and T tags in a separate Praat tier. The background is left unmarked. Guidelines combine general principles, rules for specific constructions such as clefts and left dislocations, and default heuristics. Two coders tagged much of the data independently and reached kappa of 0.7–0.8. Most disagreements concerned the left edge of the focus, which led to a new rule favouring wide focus when in doubt. A pilot study then tested whether intra-clausal pauses relate to focus. Words in focus are less often preceded by a pause than words overall, but focused adjectives attract pauses. The explanation offered is that speakers pause before the property that distinguishes the referent from similar objects. The resource enables systematic study of how information structure interacts with prosody and syntax.

## Key points
- The annotated portion of DanPASS has 54 monologues from 18 subjects across three tasks: describing a geometric network, guiding house-drawing assembly, and a map task. About two person-months of annotation covered the network (4402 words) and house (8562 words) sections.
- Two thirds of the material was tagged independently by both coders, with kappa between 0.7 and 0.8. Disagreements on the focus left boundary were resolved by preferring wide focus.
- In the pilot study (network monologues, one coder, 3659 words), 28.34% of all words are preceded by a pause, compared with 20.29% of focus words.
- Within the focus domain (1661 words), 36.34% of adjectives follow a pause, far more often than other categories (e.g., verbs 6.33%, pronouns 4.76%).
- A decision tree learner produced two main rules: pauses inside the focus tend to fall between a determiner and an adjective, or between an adjective and a noun. Such pauses do not mark the focus boundary or phrasal boundaries.

*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/)

## 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.

- [Towards the Annotation of Penn TreeBank with Information Structure](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bohnet-2013-annotation-penn-treebank-information-structure/)
- [(Pre-)Annotation of Topic-Focus Articulation in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mirovsky-2013-pre-annotation-topic-focus-articulation/)
- [Annotation of Information Structure: an Evaluation across different Types of Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ritz-2008-annotation-information-structure-evaluation-across/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{paggio2006annotating,
  title = {{Annotating Information Structure in a Corpus of Spoken Danish}},
  author = {Paggio, Patrizia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06)},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.63317/2veumzykohq6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2veumzykohq6}
}
```

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## References

13 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Paul Boersma. 2001. Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5(9/10):341–345. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Paul+Boersma%2E+2001%2E+Praat%2C+a+system+for+doing+phonetics+by+computer%2E+Glot+International%2C+5%289%2F10%29%3A341%E2%80%93345%2E)
2. Philip Diderichsen and Jakob Elming. 2005. A corpus-based approach to topic in Danish dialog. In Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, pages 119–114. Ann Arbor Michigan, June. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Philip+Diderichsen+and+Jakob+Elming%2E+2005%2E+A+corpus%2Dbased+approach+to+topic+in+Danish+dialog%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+ACL+Student+Research+Workshop%2C+pages+119%E2%80%93114%2E+Ann+Arbor+Michigan%2C+June%2E)
3. Nina Grønnum. 2006. DanPASS - a Danish phonetically annotated spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of LREC 2006, Genova, Italy, May. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Nina+Gr%C3%B8nnum%2E+2006%2E+DanPASS+%2D+a+Danish+phonetically+annotated+spontaneous+speech%2E+In+Proceedings+of+LREC+2006%2C+Genova%2C+Italy%2C+May%2E)
4. Peter Molbæk Hansen, Niels Reinholt Petersen, and Ebbe Spang-Hanssen. 1993. Syntactic boundaries and pauses in read-aloud Danish prose. In Björn Granström and Lennart Nord, editors, Nordic Prosody VI. Papers from a symposium, pages 159–172. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Peter+Molb%C3%A6k+Hansen%2C+Niels+Reinholt+Petersen%2C+and+Ebbe+Spang%2DHanssen%2E+1993%2E+Syntactic+boundaries+and+pauses+in+read%2Daloud+Danish+prose%2E+In+Bjo%CC%88rn+Granstro%CC%88m+and+Lennart+Nord%2C+editors%2C+Nordic+Prosody+V)
5. Anne Jensen. 2005. Clause Linkage in Spoken Danish. Ph.D. thesis, Department of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, July. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Anne+Jensen%2E+2005%2E+Clause+Linkage+in+Spoken+Danish%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Department+of+General+and+Applied+Linguistics%2C+University+of+Copenhagen%2C+July%2E)
6. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Geert-Jan M. Kruijff. 2004. Discourse-level annotation for investigating information structure. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation, pages 41–48. Barcelona, Spain. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ivana+Kruijff%2DKorbayova%CC%81+and+Geert%2DJan+M%2E+Kruijff%2E+2004%2E+Discourse%2Dlevel+annotation+for+investigating+information+structure%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+ACL+Workshop+on+Discourse+Annotation%2C+pages+41%E2%80%9348%2E+Ba)
7. Knud Lambrecht. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511620607)
8. Patrizia Paggio. 2006. Information structure and pauses in a corpus of spoken Danish. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics EACL, Trento, Italy. In press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Patrizia+Paggio%2E+2006%2E+Information+structure+and+pauses+in+a+corpus+of+spoken+Danish%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+11th+Conference+of+the+European+Chapter+of+the+Association+of+Computational+Linguistics+EACL)
9. Oana Postolache. 2005. Learning information structure in the Prague treebank. In Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, pages 115–120. Ann Arbor, Michigan, June. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Oana+Postolache%2E+2005%2E+Learning+information+structure+in+the+Prague+treebank%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+ACL+Student+Research+Workshop%2C+pages+115%E2%80%93120%2E+Ann+Arbor%2C+Michigan%2C+June%2E)
10. Tanya Reinhart. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: an analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica, 27(1):53–94. [↗](https://doi.org/10.21825/philosophica.82606)
11. Mark Steedman. 2003. Information-structural semantics for English intonation. In Proceedings of LSA Summer Institute Workshop on Topic and Focus. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mark+Steedman%2E+2003%2E+Information%2Dstructural+semantics+for+English+intonation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+LSA+Summer+Institute+Workshop+on+Topic+and+Focus%2E)
12. Santa Barbara, July 2001. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Santa+Barbara%2C+July+2001%2E)
13. Ian H. Witten and Frank Eibe. 2005. Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco, 2nd edition. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ian+H%2E+Witten+and+Frank+Eibe%2E+2005%2E+Data+Mining%3A+Practical+machine+learning+tools+and+techniques%2E+Morgan+Kaufmann%3A+San+Francisco%2C+2nd+edition%2E)