Discourse structure and discourse relations are an important ingredient in systems for the analysis of text that go beyond the boundary of single clauses. Discourse relations often indicate important additional information about the connection between two clauses, such as causality, and are widely believed to have an influence on aspects of reference resolution. More so than for referential annotation, discourse relation annotation is rendered difficult by the absence of a general consensus on the underlying linguistic phenomena that should be targeted, as well as by a lack of strong predictions on the possible or permissible interactions between these phenomena.

While it is sometimes claimed that the structuring of discourse is only weakly constrained and as a result capturing discourse structure and discourse relations will always result in poor reproducibility of the annotation task, we want to argue in this paper that an explicit notion of the relata of discourse relations allows to delimit annotation scope and to make use of theoretical accounts of the linguistic phenomena involved without giving up the goal of theory-neutrality that is essential in making sure that a given resource stays useful to a large community of users.

In this article, we first present the general design choices that are to be made in the design of an annotation scheme for discourse structure and discourse relations. In a second part, we present the scheme used in our annotation of selected articles from the TüBa-D/Z treebank of German (Telljohann et al., 2009). The scheme used in the annotation is theory-neutral, but informed by more detailed linguistic knowledge in the way of linguistic tests that can help disambiguate between several plausible relations.