Detecting Potentially Under-annotated Explicit Discourse Connectives in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB-3) with LLMs

Yueh-Ting Chuang, Xixian Liao, Bonnie Webber


Abstract
Accurate identification of explicit discourse connectives is crucial for analysing discourse relations, which supports NLP tasks such as summarisation and question answering. However, annotation inconsistencies remain a challenge, particularly for ambiguous prepositions with both discourse and non-discourse usages. This paper presents a pipeline that leverages large language model (LLM) prompting, cross-model agreement, and syntactic pattern analysis to detect likely under-annotated connectives. Evaluated on four prepositions (by, with, without and for), the approach effectively identifies likely under-annotations for some, but not all prepositions. Results show that while the method is promising, its generalisability depends on improved prompt design, model choice, and syntactic analysis tools. The findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLM-based approaches for corpus error detection and demonstrate how improved discourse annotation can contribute to more reliable data for downstream NLP tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.158
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2012–2023
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-158
DOI:
10.63317/5392qqgkyzs5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yueh-Ting Chuang, Xixian Liao, and Bonnie Webber. 2026. Detecting Potentially Under-annotated Explicit Discourse Connectives in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB-3) with LLMs. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2012–2023, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Potentially Under-annotated Explicit Discourse Connectives in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB-3) with LLMs (Chuang et al., LREC 2026)
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