Experiments with Annotating Discourse Relations in the Hindi Discourse Relation Bank

In the Hindi Discourse Relation Bank (HDRB) project, we are developing a large corpus annotated with discourse relations, such as causal, temporal, contrastive and conjunctive relations. Adopting the lexically grounded approach of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), we annotate the argument structure of both explicit and implicit discourse relations, as well as the senses of relations. We describe our initial annotation experiments, which have led to the discovery of additional connective classes and the development of a modified sense classification scheme. We also present some distributional results from our initial annotations, and propose some insightful cross-linguistic generalizations by comparisons with the discourse relation distributions of English texts in the PDTB. Finally, we present an additional study of the properties of some connectives that belong to the class of discourse adverbials.