Polish Discourse Corpus (PDC): Corpus Design, ISO-Compliant Annotation, Data Highlights, and Parser Development

Abstract

This paper presents the Polish Discourse Corpus, a pioneering resource of this kind for Polish and the first corpus in Poland to employ the ISO standard for discourse relation annotation. The Polish Discourse Corpus adopts ISO 24617-8, a segment of the Language Resource Management – Semantic Annotation Framework (SemAF), which outlines a set of core discourse relations adaptable for diverse languages and genres. The paper overviews the corpus architecture, annotation procedures, the challenges that the annotators have encountered, as well as key statistical data concerning discourse relations and connectives in the corpus. It further discusses the initial phases of the discourse parser tailored for the ISO 24617-8 framework. Evaluations on the efficacy and potential refinement areas of the corpus annotation and parsing strategies are also presented. The final part of the paper touches upon anticipated research plans to improve discourse analysis techniques in the project and to conduct discourse studies involving multiple languages.