RI: Exploiting and Exploring Discourse Connectivity: Deriving New Technology and Knowledge from the Penn Discourse Treebank

在句子层次上标注的大规模语料库在自然语言研究中起着至关重要的作用。它们使统计知识（来自语料库）与语言知识的大规模整合成为可能，从而导致技术和科学应用，例如信息提取，问答，摘要和机器翻译等。这种方法现在被扩展到语篇层面，从而超越了句子层面。使用一个名为Penn Discourse Treebank（PDTB）的资源，一个用话语结构沿着相关语义注释的大规模语料库，正在进行关于话语处理的新的主要实验工作，导致生成更连贯的摘要和文本，提取文本中的复杂关系，以及与语言技术相关的基础研究。这项工作也提供了一个更深入的理解句子层次和语篇层次结构之间的关系。在追求这些目标的同时，也在开发各种工具，以有效利用PDTB资源。该研究计划还与一个强大的教育计划相结合，该计划涉及PDTB方法的培训研究人员，以便类似的资源可以用其他语言开发，这些语言与英语大不相同。研究计划的这一部分具有国际组成部分，包括与捷克共和国，印度和芬兰的研究小组合作。 这项国际合作由NSF国际科学与工程办公室资助。

Large scale corpora annotated at the sentence level have played a critical role in natural language research. They have enabled large scale integration of statistical knowledge (derived from the corpora) with linguistic knowledge leading to both technological and scientific applications, such as information extraction, question answering, summarization, and machine translation, among others. This approach is now being extended to the discourse level, thus going beyond the sentence level. Using a resource called the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), a large scale corpus annotated with discourse structure along with the associated semantics, new major experimental work on discourse processing is being carried out, leading to the generation of more coherent summaries and texts, extraction of complex relations in texts, among others, as well as foundational research relevant to language technology. This work is also providing a deeper understanding of the relationship between sentence level and discourse level structures. While pursuing these goals, a variety of tools for making a productive use of the PDTB resource are also being developed. This research program is also coupled with a strong educational program involving training researchers in the PDTB methodology so that similar resources can be developed in other languages substantially divergent from English. This part of the research program has international components including collaboration with research groups in Czech Republic, India, and Finland. The international collaboration is funded by the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.