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Annotating Attribution Relations: Towards an Italian Discourse Treebank

In this paper we describe the development of a schema for the annotation of attribution relations and present the first findings and some relevant issues concerning this phenomenon. Following the D-LTAG approach to discourse, we have developed a lexically anchored description of attribution, considering this relation, contrary to the approach in the PDTB, independently from other discourse relations. This approach has allowed us to deal with the phenomenon in a broader perspective than previous studies, reaching therefore a more accurate description of it and making it possible to raise some still unaddressed issues. Following this analysis, we propose an annotation schema and discuss the first results concerning its applicability. The schema has been applied to a pilot portion of the ISST corpus of Italian and represents the initial phase of a project aiming at the creation of an Italian Discourse Treebank. We believe this work will raise some awareness concerning the fundamental importance of attribution relations. The identification of the source has in fact strong implications for the attributed material. Moreover, it will make overt the complexity of a phenomenon for long underestimated.