A qualitative comparison method for rhetorical structures: identifying different discourse structures in multilingual corpora

• Published in: Language Resources and Evaluation Vol. 49; no. 2; pp. 263 - 309
• Main Authors: Iruskieta, Mikel, da Cunha, Iria, Taboada, Maite
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.06.2015; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Annotations; Basque language; Comparative studies; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Contrastive analysis; Conveying; Corpus analysis; Corpus linguistics; Discourse analysis; Discourse strategies; Discourse structure; English language; Language and Literature; Languages; Linguistics; Original Paper; Rhetoric; Rhetorical structure theory; Segmentation; Social Sciences; Spanish language; Strategy; Texts; Theoretical linguistics; Translation methods and strategies; Translations; Rhetorical Structure Theory; Translation strategies; Discourse analysis; Annotation evaluation
• ISSN: 1574-020X; 1572-8412; 1574-0218
• DOI: 10.1007/s10579-014-9271-6

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these aims we have carried out a contrastive analysis, comparing a corpus of parallel English, Spanish and Basque texts, using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We propose a method to describe the main linguistic differences among the rhetorical structures of the three languages in the two annotation stages (segmentation and rhetorical analysis). We show a new type of comparison that has important advantages with regard to the quantitative method usually employed: it provides an accurate measurement of inter-annotator agreement, and it pinpoints sources of disagreement among annotators. With the use of this new method, we show how translation strategies affect discourse structure.