Annotating Discourse Connectives in Spoken Turkish

Abstract

In an attempt to extend Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) / Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) style annotations to spoken Turkish, this paper presents the first attempt at annotating the explicit discourse connectives in the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC) demo version. We present the data and the method for the annotation. Then we reflect on the issues and challenges of transitioning from written to spoken language. We present the preliminary findings suggesting that the distribution of the search tokens and their use as discourse connectives are similar in the TDB and the STC demo.