Mapping Different Rhetorical Relation Annotations: A Proposal

Annotation efforts have resulted in the availability of a number of corpora with rhetorical relation information. The corpora, unfortunately, are annotated under different theoretical approaches and have different hierarchies of relations. In addition, new sets of rhetorical relations have been proposed to account for language variation. The types of relations, however, tend to overlap or be related in specific ways. We believe that differences across approaches are minimal, and a unified set of relations that works across languages is possible. This paper details a new taxonomy of relations organized in four top level-classes with a total of 26 relations. We propose a mapping between existing annotations and show that our taxonomy is robust across theories, and can be applied to multiple languages.