@InProceedings{wang-EtAl:2017:Short2,
  author    = {Wang, Xinhao  and  Bruno, James  and  Molloy, Hillary  and  Evanini, Keelan  and  Zechner, Klaus},
  title     = {Discourse Annotation of Non-native Spontaneous Spoken Responses Using the Rhetorical Structure Theory Framework},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Vancouver, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {263--268},
  abstract  = {The availability of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) Discourse Treebank
	has spurred substantial research into discourse analysis of written texts;
	however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and
	parsing of spoken language, in particular, non-native spontaneous speech.
	Considering that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key
	metric in human scoring rubrics for assessments of spoken language, we
	initiated a research effort to obtain RST annotations of a large number of
	non-native spoken responses from a standardized assessment of academic English
	proficiency. The resulting inter-annotator kappa agreements on the three
	different levels of Span, Nuclearity, and Relation are 0.848, 0.766, and 0.653,
	respectively. Furthermore, a set of features was explored to evaluate the
	discourse structure of non-native spontaneous speech based on these
	annotations; the highest performing feature resulted in a correlation of 0.612
	with scores of discourse coherence provided by expert human raters.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/P17-2041}
}