Building a Chinese discourse topic corpus with a micro-topic scheme based on theme-rheme theory

*Correspondence: [email protected] 2School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, ShiZi Road, Suzhou, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Background: How to build a suitable discourse topic structure is an important issue in discourse topic analysis, which is the core of natural language understanding. Not only is it the key basic unit to implement automatic computing, but also the key to realize the transformation from unstructured data to structured data during the process of big data analytics. Although the discourse topic structure has wide potential for application in discourse analysis and related tasks, the research on constructing such discourse resources is quite limited in Chinese language. In this paper, we propose a micro-topic scheme (MTS) to represent the discourse topic structure in the Chinese language according to theme-rheme theory, with elementary discourse topic unit(EDTU) as the node and referent of theme-rheme as link. In particular, thematic progression is employed to directly represent the development of the discourse topic structure.