--- title: "The Thai Discourse Treebank — Prasertsom 2024" description: "Thai has had no annotated resource for discourse analysis." authors: ["Ponrawee Prasertsom", "Apiwat Jaroonpol", "Attapol T. Rutherford"] year: 2024 venue: "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2024.tacl-1.34/" doi: "10.1162/tacl_a_00650" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/prasertsom-2024-thai-discourse-treebank-annotating-classifying/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/prasertsom-2024-thai-discourse-treebank-annotating-classifying/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2024/page/4/) / The Thai Discourse Treebank: Annotating and Classifying Thai Discourse Connectives # The Thai Discourse Treebank: Annotating and Classifying Thai Discourse Connectives **Authors:** Ponrawee Prasertsom, Apiwat Jaroonpol, Attapol T. Rutherford · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2024.tacl-1.34/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2024.tacl-1.34.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/tacl\_a\_00650](https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00650) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4396573656) **Citations:** 1 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [10](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Thai has had no annotated resource for discourse analysis. The task is also harder in Thai than in English. The writing system does not mark clause or sentence boundaries with punctuation, and the language has little morphology to flag connectives. Many connective words are also ambiguous between senses or can play non-discourse roles. To fill this gap, the authors built the Thai Discourse Treebank, the first sizeable Thai corpus annotated in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) tradition. They wrote Thai-specific guidelines based on the PDTB-3 scheme and labelled explicit connectives, their senses and paired connectives on tokenized text from the LST20 corpus. Part of the data also has argument spans. They then benchmarked connective identification and sense classification with several systems: a dictionary baseline, CRF, MaxEnt and pretrained language models such as WangchanBERTa. Identification proved nearly solved, but assigning senses remains difficult. Model errors closely mirror the cases where human annotators disagreed. The released corpus and connective inventory offer a baseline for Thai discourse parsing. They may also help with other languages that lack clause marking, such as Lao and Burmese. ## Key points - **Corpus size:** 384 documents and about 10,600 sentences, with 18,374 connective instances across 33 relation senses. Argument spans are annotated for 180 of the documents. - **Connective inventory:** 148 potentially polysemous connectives, giving 340 form–sense pairs, released with classification criteria. The data is available at github.com/nlp-chula/thai-discourse-treebank. - **Sense scheme:** the scheme stays close to PDTB-3, adding only Expansion.GenExpansion to keep compatibility. - **Best results:** F1 0.96 for connective identification and macro-F1 0.46 for level-2 sense classification. PLMs beat CRF models at every sentence length, and single-sentence input worked better than sentence pairs. - **Error analysis:** the main error sources were confusable senses (e.g., Concession.Arg2-As-Denier vs. Contrast), coordination, and words that can serve other grammatical functions. These patterns parallel inter-annotator disagreements. *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/) · [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/treebanks/) ## Cited by Cited by 10 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 9 not yet. - [GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/liu-2024-gdtb-genre-diverse-data-english/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @article{prasertsom2024thai, title = {{The Thai Discourse Treebank: Annotating and Classifying Thai Discourse Connectives}}, author = {Prasertsom, Ponrawee and Jaroonpol, Apiwat and Rutherford, Attapol T.}, journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics}, year = {2024}, doi = {10.1162/tacl\_a\_00650}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00650} } ``` - [← previous The Sale of Joseph in Genesis 37:18–26: Narrative Cohesion and Coherence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hbo-2024-mcaffee-sale-joseph-genesis-37-1826/) - [next → TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/zhang-2024-tinyllama-open-source-small-language/) - [↑ back to papers of 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2024/page/4/) ## References 4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Another particularly common error type involves the model misclassifying a co-ordinator as a non-connective that has the same form is a connective (or vice-versa). In (18), co-ordinating the two VPs but is misclassified as a non-connective, plausibly because it can also co-ordinate NPs in other case… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Another+particularly+common+error+type+involves+the+model+misclassifying+a+co%2Dordinator+as+a+non%2Dconnective+that+has+the+same+form+is+a+connective+%28or+vice%2Dversa%29%2E+In+%2818%29%2C+co%2Dordinating+the+two+VPs+b) 2. Amal Al-Saif and Katja Markert. 2010. The Leeds Arabic discourse treebank: Annotating discourse connectives for Arabic. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Amal+Al%2DSaif+and+Katja+Markert%2E+2010%2E+The+Leeds+Arabic+discourse+treebank%3A+Annotating+discourse+connectives+for+Arabic%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Seventh+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/saif-2010-leeds-arabic-discourse-treebank-annotating/) 3. Nicholas Asher. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Springer Netherlands. Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1715-9 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1715-9) 4. Prachya Boonkwan, Vorapon Luantangsrisuk, Sitthaa Phaholphinyo, Kanyanat Kriengket, Dhanon Leenoi, Charun Phrombut, Monthika Boriboon, Krit Kosawat, and Thepchai Supnithi. 2020. The annotation guideline of lst20 corpus. https://doi.org/10 .48550/arXiv.2008.05055 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Prachya+Boonkwan%2C+Vorapon+Luantangsrisuk%2C+Sitthaa+Phaholphinyo%2C+Kanyanat+Kriengket%2C+Dhanon+Leenoi%2C+Charun+Phrombut%2C+Monthika+Boriboon%2C+Krit+Kosawat%2C+and+Thepchai+Supnithi%2E+2020%2E+The+annotation+guideli)