From Interoperable Annotations towards Interoperable Resources: A Multilingual Approach to the Analysis of Discourse

From Interoperable Annotations towards Interoperable Resources: A Multilingual Approach to the Analysis of Discourse Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski*, Kerstin Anna Kunz**, Anna Nedoluzhko*** Saarland University*, University of Heidelberg**, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics*** e.lapshinova@mx.uni-saarland.de, kerstin.kunz@iued.uni-heidelberg.de, nedoluzko@ufal.mff.cuni.cz Abstract In the present paper, we analyse variation of discourse phenomena in two typologically different languages, i.e. in German and Czech. The novelty of our approach lies in the nature of the resources we are using. Advantage is taken of existing resources, which are, however, annotated on the basis of two different frameworks. We use an interoperable scheme unifying discourse phenomena in both frameworks into more abstract categories and considering only those phenomena that have a direct match in German and Czech. The discourse properties we focus on are relations of identity, semantic similarity, ellipsis and discourse relations. Our study shows that the application of interoperable schemes allows an exploitation of discourse-related phenomena analysed in different projects and on the basis of different frameworks. As corpus compilation and annotation is a time-consuming task, positive results of this experiment open up new paths for contrastive linguistics, translation studies and NLP, including machine translation. Keywords: interoperability, linguistic annotation, multilingual resources, discourse, coreference, German-Czech contrasts 1. Introduction This paper aims at a cross-lingual analysis of discourse phe- nomena in the two typologically different languages – Ger- man and Czech. The discourse properties in focus are re- lations of identity and non-identity (semantic similarity) of discourse entities, ellipsis and discourse relations (types of conjunctions). Information on differences between the two languages in terms of discourse structuring devices is bene- ficial to contrastive linguistics, translation studies and mul- tilingual natural language processing. The novelty of our analysis lies in the nature of the re- sources used. Quantitative contrastive analyses on the level of discourse require annotated corpora involving time- consuming compilation and annotation, especially in a mul- tilingual setting. Therefore, we take advantage of the ex- isting resources reflecting systemic peculiarities and reali- sational options of the languages under analysis. We use Czech and German data annotated on the basis of two different frameworks: Functional Generative Description, see (Sgall et al., 1986), for Czech, and textual cohesion, see (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), for German. In our previous work, see (Lapshinova et al., 2015), we have shown that annotations of the involved resources are comparable if ab- stract categories are used and only the phenomena with a direct match in the frameworks for German and Czech are taken into consideration. We have also shown that although being not general enough to permit a comparison across Germanic and Slavic languages, the existing annotated re- sources capture the same phenomena, and the creation of an interoperable scheme is possible if more abstract cate- gories are taken into consideration. Hence, we make use of this scheme to perform a comparison between German and Czech. Our analysis is a first step towards unifying separate anal- yses of discourse relations in Germanic and Slavic lan- guages. At the same time, it demonstrates that …

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