1. Imam University
College of Computer and Information systems
Prepared by:
Al-harbi.A
Al-Gumlas.H
Al-Otaibi.E

2. • Introduction :
 Discourse usually refers to a form of written text or spoken
language.
 A text is not only a sequence of sentences or clauses, but
rather it is a coherent object that has many cohesive devices
linking its units (words, clauses and sentences).

3. • Discourse Relations
 There are two types of discourse relations:
(i) Relations that are signalled explicitly via so called discourse
connectives.
(ii) Relations that can be inferred from the context without any
signaling.
 Discourse relations are semantic relations.

4. • Discourse Relations

5. • Discourse Connectives
 Types :
 Simple Connectives
Ex: because - after – and
 Paired Connectives
Ex: if' – Then - although -
 Modified Connectives
Ex: even if - and also
 Combined Connectives
Ex: except after - and but

6. Related Work :
. Several textual corpora of Arabic exist.
. Some of them are available with Part-of-Speech and syntactic annotation
such as the Arabic Treebank (ATB) The Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank
(PADT), which is smaller in scale than the ATB, contains multilevel
annotations, including morphological and analytical level of linguistic
representation.
. Also, a recent effort by Dukes and Habash (2010) has produced The
Quranic) has produced The Quranic Arabic Corpus, a free annotated linguistic
resource which provides morphological annotation and syntactic analysis of
the Holy Quran.

7. • Collecting Arabic Connectives
.They are collected a large set of Arabic discourse connectives using text
analysis and corpus-based techniques.
Example :
A. [ ] DC[ ] Arg1‚ [ ] Arg2.
B. [al-sy¯arh mtt.wrh ˇgd¯an.] Arg1 [lknh¯a] DC [b¯ahz. ah alt-mn] Arg2
C. [The car is so modern.] Arg1 [but] DC [it is too expensive] Arg2.

8. • Annotation Scheme
. Annotation is based on lexicalized grammar theory.
1. The anchor of the annotation is the lexical item – a discourse
connective (DC).
2. The Arg2 label is assigned to the argument with which the
connective was syntactically associated.
3. The Arg1 label, can refer to an abstract object at any distance from
the connective.

9. Theories of Discourse Structure
. Linguists attempted to produce reasonable generalized theories to represent
discourse structure.
. Theories of discourse structure differ in their focus according to the type of
discourse such as :
written text or dialogue, the type of organization such as intentional
organization (speaker’s plan).
. One of the most popular discourse theories is :
RSTRhetorical Structure Theory

10. RST
. RST is a theory of how coherence in text is achieved
. RST was originally developed as part of studies of
computer-based text generation
. RST is designed to explain the coherence of texts, seen as a kind of
function, linking parts of a text to each other.

11. RST
Relation Name Nucleus Satellite
Background text whose
understanding is being
facilitated
text for facilitating
understanding
Elaboration basic information additional information
Preparation text to be presented text which prepares the reader
to expect and interpret the text
to be presented.

12. RST Example
With just those relations, we can illustrate the analysis
of a text.

13. applications
• Question-Answering and Information Extraction
systems
• Speech Recognition.
• Text Generation.
• Essay Scoring.
• Text Summarization.

14. Dicourse Annotation tool for English and
Arabic

15. Thank you