Irina Pavlova’s scientific contributions

The paper deals with the pilot version of the first RST discourse treebank for Russian. The project started in 2016. At present, the treebank consists of sixty news texts annotated for rhetorical relations according to RST scheme. However, this scheme was slightly modified in order to achieve higher inter-annotator agreement score. During the annotation procedure, we also registered the discourse connectives of different types and mapped them onto the corresponding rhetoric relations. In present paper, we discuss our experience of RST scheme adaptation for Russian news texts. Besides, we report on the distribution of the most frequent discourse connectives in our corpus. The pdf version of the paper is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2w9OsTtG6QMYkYtd21XYjZVSGM/view

For many natural language processing tasks (machine translation evaluation, anaphora resolution, information retrieval, etc.) a corpus of texts annotated for discourse structure is essential. As for now, there are no such corpora of written Russian, which stands in the way of developing a range of applications. This paper presents the first steps of constructing a Rhetorical Structure Corpus of the Russian language. Main annotation principles are discussed, as well as the problems that arise and the ways to solve them. Since annotation consistency is often an issue when texts are manually annotated for something as subjective as discourse structure, we specifically focus on the subject of inter-annotator agreement measurement. We also propose a new set of rhetorical relations (modified from the classic Mann & Thompson set), which is more suitable for Russian. We aim to use the corpus for experiments on discourse parsing and believe that the corpus will be of great help to other researchers. The corpus will be made available for public use.