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<Paper uid="W99-0307">
  <Title>Experiments in Constructing a Corpus of Discourse Trees</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Empirical studies of discourse structure have primarily focused on identifying discourse segment boundaries and their linguistic correlates. Very little attention has been paid so far to the highlevel, rhetorical relations that hold between discourse segments. In some cases, the role of these relations was considered to fall outside the scope of a study (Flammia and Zue, 1995); in other cases, judgements were made with respect to a taxonomy of very few intention-based relations (usually dominance and satisfaction-precedence) (Grosz and Hirschberg, 1992; Nakatani et al., 1995; Hirschberg and Litman, 1987; Passonneau and Litman, 1997; Carletta et al., 1997). And in the only case in which a rich taxonomy of 29 relations was used (Moser and Moore, 1997), the corpus was small and specific to a very restricted genre: written interactions between a student and tutor on the subject of fault location and repair in electronic circuitry.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In spite of many influential proposals in the linguistic of discourse structures and relations (Ballard et al., 1971; Grimes, 1975; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Martin, 1992; Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992; Sanders et al., 1993; Asher, 1993; Lascarides and Asher, 1993; Knott, 1995; Hovy and Maier, 1993), a number of empirical questions remain to be answered.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * Can human judges construct rich discourse structures in a manner that ensures inter-judge agreement that is statistically significant? * How can one measure the agreement? #&amp;quot; How should judges (and programs) construct the discourse structure of texts; should they follow a top-down, bottom-up, or an incremental procedure? * How does the genre of a text influence the degree to which judges achieve agreement on the task of rhetorical tagging? In this paper, we describe an experiment designed to answer these questions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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