The Role of the German Vorfeld for Local Coherence : a pilot study

In this paper, we want to investigate the contribution of the German Vorfeld to local coherence. We annotate a corpus of parliament debates with a small set of coarse-grained labels, marking the functions of the Vorfeld constituents. The labels encode referential and discourse relations as well as non-relational functions. Based on the annotations, we investigate different features and feature correlations that could be of use for automatic text processing. Finally, we perform an experiment, consisting of an insertion task, to assess the individual impact of different types of Vorfeld on local coherence