A Discourse Resource for Turkish: Annotating Discourse Connectives in the METU Corpus

This paper describes first steps towards extending the METU Turkish Corpus from a sentence-level language resource to a discourse-level resource by annotating its discourse connectives and their arguments. The project is based on the same principles as the Penn Discourse TreeBank (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb) and is supported by TUBITAK, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. We first present the goals of the project and the METU Turkish corpus. We then describe how we decided what to take as explicit discourse connectives and the range of syntactic classes they come from. With representative examples of each class, we examine explicit connectives, their linear ordering, and types of syntactic units that can serve as their arguments. We then touch upon connectives with respect to free word order in Turkish and punctuation, as well as the important issue of how much material is needed to specify an argument. We close with a brief discussion of current plans.