Deciding on units of analysis within Centering Theory
Maite Taboada, Loreley Hadic Zabala · Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory · 2008
Many efforts in corpora annotation start with segmenting discourse into units of analysis. In this paper, we present a method for deciding on segmentation units within Centering Theory (Grosz et al. 1995). We survey the different existing methods to break down discourse into utterances and discuss the results of a comparison study among them. The contribution of our study is that it was carried out with spoken data and in two different languages (English and Spanish). Our comparison suggests that the best unit of analysis for Centering-based annotation is the finite clause. The final result is a set of guidelines for how to segment discourse for Centering analysis, which is also potentially applicable to other analyses.