Abstract

This paper describes an automatic discourse relation alignment experiment as an empirical justification of the planned annotation projection approach to enlarge the 3600-word multilingual corpus of TED Multilingual Discourse Bank (TED-MDB). The experiment is carried out on a single language pair (English-Turkish) included in TED-MDB. The paper first describes the creation of a large corpus of English-Turkish bi-sentences, then it presents a sense-based experiment that automatically aligns the relations in the English sentences of TED-MDB with the Turkish sentences. The results are very close to the results obtained from an earlier semi-automatic post-annotation alignment experiment validated by human annotators and are encouraging for future annotation projection tasks.