Article published in:
The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence: Theories and applicationsEdited by Helmut Gruber and Gisela Redeker
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 254] 2014
► pp. 121–141
Resolving connective ambiguity
a prerequisite for discourse parsing
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.
Published online: 26 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.254.05ste
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.254.05ste
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