Abstract
Starting from the perspective that discourse structure arises from the presence of coherence relations, we provide a map of linguistic discourse structuring devices (DRDs), and focus on those for written text. We propose to structure these items by differentiating between primary and secondary connectives on the one hand, and free connecting phrases on the other. For the former, we propose that their behavior can be described by lexicons, and we show one concrete proposal that by now has been applied to three languages, with others being added in ongoing work. The lexical representations can be useful both for humans (theoretical investigations, transfer to other languages) and for machines (automatic discourse parsing and generation).
Highlights
An important strand of research on discourse coherence operates under the assumption that discourse relations are, in addition to coreference, of central importance to explain local coherence between sentences, or more generally, between discourse segments of various kinds
Starting from the perspective that discourse structure arises from the presence of coherence relations, we provide a map of linguistic discourse structuring devices (DRDs), and focus on those found in written text: connectives
For primary and secondary connectives, we propose that their behavior can be described to a large extent by declarative lexicons, and we demonstrate a concrete proposal which has been applied to five languages, with others currently being added in ongoing work
Summary
An important strand of research on discourse coherence operates under the assumption that discourse relations are, in addition to coreference, of central importance to explain local coherence between sentences, or more generally, between discourse segments of various kinds. The causal relation between Fred’s jokes and his friends’ hilarity is not overtly marked in (2) and is said to be implicit; it is said to be explicit in (1a), thanks to the primary connective as a result This difference is a acute phenomenon in shallow discourse parsing, which aims at automatically identifying discourse relations and their arguments in text. Our descriptions are based on Czech, English, French and German, but we give examples in English whenever possible illustrating phenomena that are common to these four languages (and possibly other languages) Both of these sections present our suggestions for developing new connective lexicons: how to find the set of connectives, what information to encode about them, and in which format. All shallow discourse parsers (see the shared tasks at CoNLL 2015 and 2016) follow the pipeline model implemented in Lin et al (2014), which first identifies connectives, their arguments, and the relation, and in a later stage tries to classify implicit relations using a separate module
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