Annotation Guidelines for Questions under Discussion and Information Structure

What it is about

The guidelines give a step-by-step procedure for reading the information structure of a text from its context. Each assertion is taken to answer an implicit Question under Discussion (QUD). The analyst splits the text into assertions, then writes a QUD for each one under three constraints: the QUD must be answered by the assertion (Q-A congruence), it should repeat as much given material as possible, and it may add only given or highly salient material. The QUDs form a tree, the QUD tree, whose leaves are the assertions in their linear order. Focus is the part of an assertion that answers its QUD, and the rest is background. Contrastive topics mark a superquestion split into subquestions, and optional material is labelled non-at-issue. The method is tested by hand on corpus extracts in French, German and English, and it makes no use of morphology or prosody, so it is meant to work across languages. The paper has no numbers from a model; its result is the guideline and the examples, with a claim of cross-linguistic use that is still a working hypothesis (p. 6).

Ideas

• I1. A QUD tree for tales. The story reader in world/src/qud.rs already attaches each sentence to the deepest open question with a shared content lemma and a matching answer type. Add the guideline's explicit steps as separate rules: Q-A congruence, then maximal given material, then the new-material check. Write hand QUD trees for about 30 short paragraphs of open tales (Gutenberg), with the teacher (Opus) as a draft annotator and the gates in Rust. Measure, by two-fold cv, how often the Rust tree attaches each sentence to the same parent as the gold tree.
• I2. Focus domain as a filter for answers. For a wh-question, the answer sentence is the one whose focus domain (the part that answers the QUD) holds the wh-slot. Use the focus and background split from the QUD tree as a feature in world/src/ftqa.rs, and test on FairytaleQA items that are already in the repo: does picking the sentence whose focus matches the wh-type raise the accuracy of the "what did / where / when" types?
• I3. Non-at-issue marking in en and prag. A part of a sentence is non-at-issue when deleting it leaves the sentence still an answer to the QUD (the deletion test, p. 29). Mark candidates from the UD tree: non-restrictive relative clauses, sentence-initial adverbial clauses, parentheticals, and evidential frames like "they say". Store them in the world as claims, not as main-line events. Measure agreement with a teacher-labelled set of about 200 sentences, and run the world's answer tests twice to check the gain is not noise.
• I4. Parallel structures as a rule for lists. Two or more clauses with the same frame and one changed slot share one QUD with a wh-phrase in it. This gives a rule for "they ate, they played, they slept" in tales, and for splitting the narrative line in world/src/narr.rs. Measure with a count of parallel groups per story and a check that the parallel answers feed the same question in the world reader.

For Mova

Chapters: 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (the focus and background part), 30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview (section 5, the design), and 33. Implicature and presupposition (non-at-issue content). Code: world/src/qud.rs (the QUD stack and congruence), world/src/narr.rs, world/src/ftqa.rs, en/src/parse.rs (coordination split). Licence note: the HAL deposit has no open licence. Use it as a reference for method and never ship its example texts or annotations. Our own guideline text and our own annotations of open tales are ours.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1075/slcs.199.14rie

@inproceedings{riester2018annotation,
  title = {{Annotation Guidelines for Questions under Discussion and Information Structure}},
  author = {Riester, Arndt and Brunetti, Lisa and Kuthy, Kordula De},
  booktitle = {In Adamou, Haude \& Vanhove (eds.), Information structure in lesser-described languages (SLCS 199), John Benjamins, pp. 403–443},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.1075/slcs.199.14rie},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.199.14rie}
}

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