An Investigation on the Influence of Genres and Textual Organisation on the Use of Discourse Relations

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate some of the problems associated with the automatic extraction of discourse relations. In particular, we study the influence of communicative goals encoded in a given genre against another, and between the various communicative goals encoded between sections of documents of a same genre. Some investigations have been made in the past in order to identify the differences seen across either genres or textual organization, but none have made a thorough statistical analysis of these differences across currently available annotated corpora. In this paper, we show that both the communicative goal of a given genre and, to a lesser extend, that of a particular topic tackled by that genre, do in fact influence in the distribution of discourse relations. Using a statistically grounded approach, we show that certain discourse relations are more likely to appear within given genres and subsequently within sections within a genre. In particular, we observed that Attributions are common in the newspaper articles genre while Joint relations are comparatively more frequent in online reviews. We also notice that Temporal relations are statically more common in the methodology sections of scientific research documents than in the rest of the text. These results are important as they give clues to allow the tailoring of current discourse taggers to specific textual genres.