ThemePro: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Thematic Progression

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 1000–1007 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 1000 ThemePro: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Thematic Progression M´onica Dom´ınguez1, Juan Soler-Company1, Leo Wanner2,1 University Pompeu Fabra1, ICREA2 Roc Boronat, 138, Barcelona, Spain {monica.dominguez, juan.soler, leo.wanner}@upf.edu Abstract This paper introduces ThemePro, a toolkit for the automatic analysis of thematic progression. Thematic progression is relevant to natural language processing (NLP) applications dealing, among others, with discourse structure, argumentation structure, natural language generation, summarization and topic detection. A web platform demonstrates the potential of this toolkit and provides a visualization of the results including syntactic trees, hierarchical thematicity over propositions and thematic progression over whole texts. Keywords: information structure, thematic progression, theme, rheme, natural language processing, NLP, discourse structure 1. Introduction As a rule, coherent written or spoken discourse follows a story line, which implements an interlinked theme-rheme (also referred to as topic–focus) sequence, such that the reader/listener can follow the development of the narration easily.1 The linkage follows specific, theoretically well- studied, theme-rheme patterns referred to as thematic pro- gression (Daneˇs, 1974). Thematic progression determines the organization of the discourse and is, therefore, of great relevance to a number of natural language processing (NLP) applications. How- ever, while the clausal theme–rheme structure, also known as Information Structure, has been used in natural lan- guage generation (Wanner et al., 2003; Ballesteros et al., 2015), text summarization (Bouayad-Agha et al., 2012) and even prosody generation (Dom´ınguez et al., 2017), the au- tomatic detection of thematic progression patterns in dis- course, let alone the potential of thematic progression pat- terns in downstream applications, has not been explored yet. Among the few who have tackled the topic of the- matic progression under a somewhat broader angle (and un- der different headings) that includes, e.g., anaphoric links, are, for instance, Kruijff-Korbayov´a and Kruijff (1996) and Hajiˇcov´a and M´ırovsk´y (2018). In this paper, we present an implementation that automat- ically labels thematic progression in English and demon- strate its functionalities through a web interface. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 briefly lists the main trends in theoretical studies on thematic progres- sion and introduces the fundamental concepts and termi- nology. The methodology deployed in the implementation and functionalities of our system are explained in Section 3. Conclusions and future work are outlined in Section 4. 1We follow the common interpretation that the theme– rheme/topic–focus dichotomy is a “communicative” segmentation of the meaning of an utterance into “what the utterance is about” (aka theme or topic) and “what is being uttered about it” (aka rheme, focus) (Mathesius, 1929; Daneˇs, 1970; Hajicov´a, 1986). 2. Fundamentals and Theoretical Background Thematic progression cannot be studied without a clear underlying definition of thematicity, i.e., theme–rheme di- chotomy. Since several interpretations of this dichotomy exist in the literature, we introduce first in this section the notion of thematicity we work with, and then present the thematic progression patterns that …

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