Portability of cause–effect relation markers across specialised domains and text genres: a comparative evaluation

Abstract

Lexical knowledge patterns are effective tools for identifying knowledge in corpora. As refining pattern sets is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process, re-use of patterns in subsequent research is common. The portability of patterns from one domain or corpus to another has nevertheless been questioned, although not widely evaluated. This analysis focussed on occurrences of a set of thirty-seven verbal markers of cause–effect relations in three corpora of French texts in the fields of computing, medicine and psychology. These corpora also represented two text genres: specialised and popularised/didactic. We analysed the relative frequencies of these markers and the types of relationships they expressed (specifically, those that involved a cause–effect component versus those that did not). In so doing, we aimed to evaluate and compare the markers’ occurrences with a view to shedding light on the possibilities for using markers to semi-automatically identify knowledge-rich contexts in different domains and corpora. Results show that almost all of the markers are observed in all three corpora and both text genres, and that many markers quite reliably indicate some kind of cause–effect relation. However, the relative frequencies of the individual markers and the reliability with which some of them are associated with causal senses was observed to vary between domains and text genres, suggesting that these factors require further evaluation.