Establishing criteria for RST-based discourse segmentation and annotation for texts in Basque

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a discourse annotation methodology based on Rhetorical Structure Theory and an empirical study of annotating a corpus of specialized medical texts in Basque. The annotation process includes two phases: segmentation and annotation of rhetorical relations. Phase one entails an initial study which leads to establishing linguistic criteria for sentence-based segmentation; a second phase focuses on annotation of rhetorical relations. After establishing discourse segments and rhetorical relations, the annotation process is analyzed and evaluated by means of the method commonly used in RST (Marcu 2000). Inconsistencies detected in the evaluation method lead the authors to redefine some criteria of the evaluation method. As a result of this work, a small annotated Basque-language corpus is provided to scientific community.