Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.0: Annotation for Discourse Research

We present a revised and extended version of the Potsdam Commentary Corpus, a collection of 175 German newspaper commentaries (op-ed pieces) that has been annotated with syntax trees and three layers of discourse-level information: nominal coreference, connectives and their arguments (similar to the PDTB, (Prasad et al., 2008)), and trees reflecting discourse structure according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988). Connectives have been annotated with the help of a semi-automatic tool (Conano, (Stede and Heintze, 2004)) that identifies most connectives and suggests arguments based on their syntactic category. The other layers have been created manually with dedicated annotation tools. The corpus is made available on the one hand as a set of original XML files produced with the annotation tools, based on identical tokenization. On the other hand, it will be distributed together with the open-source linguistic database ANNIS3 (Chiarcos et al., 2008; Zeldes et al., 2009), which provides multi-layer search functionality and layer-specific visualization modules. This allows for comfortable qualitative evaluation of the correlations between annotation layers.