DRIPPS: a Corpus with Discourse Relations in Perfect Participial Sentences

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new language resource for some varieties of Portuguese - European, Brazilian, Mozambican, and Angolan - and for British English, called DRIPPS (Discourse Relations In Perfect Participial Sentences). The corpus DRIPPS comprises, at the moment, 993 adverbial perfect participial sentences annotated with Discourse Relations and with the following Discourse Relational Devices: connectors, ordering of the clauses, temporal relations, tenses, and aspectual types. Additionally, an application with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed not only to browse and manipulate the corpus but also to allow the activation of specific Discourse Relation constraints, thereby selecting specific cases from the data set that can be analyzed separately. Besides calculating simple counts and percentages, insightful statistical graphs can be generated and visualized on the fly from the combination of the user-selected constraints and the loaded corpora. The application is pre-loaded with Portuguese and English cases and allows to import/load further cases from different languages/ varieties.