Article Structure

Abstract

Articles in the Penn TreeBank were identified as being reviews, summaries, letters to the editor, news reportage, corrections, wit and short verse, or quarterly profit reports.

Introduction

It is well-known that texts differ from each other in a variety of ways, including their topic, the reading level of their intended audience, and their intended purpose (eg, to instruct, to inform, to express an opinion, to summarize, to take issue with or disagree, to correct, to entertain, etc.).

Two Perspectives on Genre

The dimension of text variation of interest here is genre, which can be viewed externally, in terms of the communicative purpose of a text (Swales, 1990), or internally, in terms of features common to texts sharing a communicative purpose.

Genre in the Penn TreeBank

Although the files in the Penn TreeBank (PTB) lack any classificatory meta-data, leading the PTB to be treated as a single homogeneous collection of “news articles”, researchers who have manually examined it in detail have noted that it includes a variety of “financial reports, general interest stories, business-related news, cultural reviews, editorials and letters to the editor” (Carlson et al., 2002, p. 7).

The Penn Discourse TreeBank

Genre differences at the level of discourse in the PTB can be seen in the manual annotations of the Penn Discourse TreeBank (Prasad et al., 2008).

Connective Frequency by Genre

The analysis that follows distinguishes between two kinds of relations associated with explicit connectives in the PDTB: (l) intra-sentential discourse relations, which hold between clauses within the same sentence and are associated with subordinating conjunctions, intra-sentential coordinating conjunctions, and discourse adverbials whose arguments occur within the same sentences); and (2) explicit inter-sentential discourse relations, which hold across sentences and are associated with explicit inter-sentential connectives (inter-sentential coordinating conjunctions and discourse adverbials whose arguments are not

Connective Sense by Genre

(Pitler et al., 2008) show a difference across Level 1 senses (COMPARISON, CONTINGENCY, TEMPORAL and EXPANSION) in the PDTB in terms of their tendency to be realised by explicit connectives (a tendency of COMPARISON and TEMPORAL relations) or by Implicit Connectives (a tendency of CONTINGENCY and EXPANSION).

Automated Sense Labelling of Discourse Connectives

The focus here is on automated sense labelling of discourse connectives (Elwell and Baldridge, 2008; Marcu and Echihabi, 2002; Pitler et al., 2009; Wellner and Pustejovsky, 2007; Wellner,

Conclusion

This paper has, for the first time, provided genre information about the articles in the Penn TreeBank.