Developing the Bangla RST Discourse Treebank

Abstract

We present a corpus development project which builds a corpus in Bangla called the Bangla RST Discourse Treebank. The corpus contains a collection of 266 Bangla text, which are annotated for coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as Cause or Evidence). The texts represent the newspaper genre, which is further divided into eight sub-genres, such as business-related news, editorial columns and sport reports. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988) as the theoretical framework of the corpus. In particular, we develop our annotation guidelines based on the guidelines used in the Potsdam Commentary Corpus (Stede, 2016). In the initial phase of the corpus development process, we have annotated 16 texts, and also conducted an inter-annotator agreement study, evaluating the reliability of our guidelines and the reproducibility of our annotation. The corpus upon its completion could be used as a valuable resource for conducting (cross-linguistic) discourse studies for Bangla, and also for developing various NLP applications, such as text summarization, machine translation or sentiment analysis.

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