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In:The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence: Theories and applications
Edited by Helmut Gruber and Gisela Redeker
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 254] 2014
► pp. 121–141

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Resolving connective ambiguity

a prerequisite for discourse parsing

Published online: 26 November 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.254.05ste
Automatic discourse parsing refers to the identification of coherence relations and deriving a structural description for a text. Such parsers can derive much information from the presence of surface cues, especially connectives. These lexical signals, however, are ambiguous: Many have additional, non-connective readings; also, many connectives can signal more than one coherence relation. In this paper, we discuss the first problem, focusing on English and German: How many connectives are ambiguous, and how frequent are these in the two languages? Then we examine computational approaches for resolving such ambiguities. For English, we provide an overview of relevant work by other researchers, while for German we largely present our own studies on the utility of part-of-speech tagging for connective disambiguation.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Stede, Manfred, Tatjana Scheffler & Amália Mendes
2019. Connective-Lex: A Web-Based Multilingual Lexical Resource for Connectives. Discours :24 DOI logo
Crible, Ludivine
2017. Towards an operational category of discourse markers. In Pragmatic markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles [Studies in Language Companion Series, 186], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo

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