Towards the Annotation of Communicative Structure in Corpora

Communicative structure is central to the linguistic representation at nearly all levels of the Meaning-Text Models (MTMs). Its correlation with lexical and syntactic features makes it also essential for such natural language processing applications as text generation, which is about to undergo a significant shift from the symbolic, rule-based paradigm to the statistical paradigm. In the statistical paradigm, the availability of sufficiently large corpora annotated with linguistic information, and thus also with the communicative structure (CommStr), is critical. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no corpora annotated with CommStr in the sense of the Meaning-Text Theory are available. We describe two experiments that explore how such corpora can be obtained. In the first experiment, a fragment of a Spanish Treebank is annotated manually. In the second experiment, we exploit the correlation of CommStr with syntactic features to annotate the English PropBank.