The distribution of discourse relations within and across turns in
  spontaneous conversation
S. Magalí López Cortez Cassandra L. Jacobs
Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people
leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In
this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous
dialogue using crowdsourced annotations from novice annotators. We then test
whether discourse relations are used differently across several types of
multi-utterance contexts. We compare the patterns of DR annotation within and
across speakers and within and across turns. Ultimately, we find that different
discourse contexts produce distinct distributions of discourse relations, with
single-turn annotations creating the most uncertainty for annotators.
Additionally, we find that the discourse relation annotations are of sufficient
quality to predict from embeddings of discourse units.