A framework for annotating information structure in discourse

Abstract

We present a framework for the integrated analysis of the textual and prosodic characteristics of information structure in the Switchboard corpus of conversational English. Information structure describes the availability, organisation and salience of entities in a discourse model. We present standards for the annotation of information status (old, mediated and new), and give guidelines for annotating information structure, i.e. theme/rheme and background/kontrast. We show that information structure in English can only be analysed concurrently with prosodic prominence and phrasing. Along with existing annotations which we have integrated using NXT technology, the corpus will be unique in the field of conversational speech in terms of size and richness of annotation, vital for many NLP applications.