Towards a Discourse Relation Algebra for Comparing Discourse Structures

International audienceWe propose a methodology for building discourse relations inference rules, to be integrated into an algebra of these relations. The construction of these rules has as main objective to allow for the calculation of the discourse closure of a structure, i.e. deduce all the discourse relations it implicitly contains. Calculating the closure of discourse structures improves their comparison, in particular within the evaluation of discourse parsing systems. We present and illustrate the adopted methodology, taking as theoretical background the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory