Chinese Discourse Annotation Reference Manual
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent annotation practices for researchers and developers working on Chinese discourse analysis, though it is incremental as it adapts existing RST frameworks to a new language.
The authors tackled the lack of standardized guidelines for Rhetorical Structure Theory annotation in Mandarin Chinese by creating a comprehensive reference manual, which includes preprocessing steps, syntactic criteria for segmentation, and examples of discourse relations across genres.
This document provides extensive guidelines and examples for Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) annotation in Mandarin Chinese. The guideline is divided into three sections. We first introduce preprocessing steps to prepare data for RST annotation. Secondly, we discuss syntactic criteria to segment texts into Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs). Lastly, we provide examples to define and distinguish discourse relations in different genres. We hope that this reference manual can facilitate RST annotations in Chinese and accelerate the development of the RST framework across languages.