Combining Word Patterns and Discourse Markers for Paradigmatic Relation Classification

Distinguishing between paradigmatic relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy is an important prerequisite in a range of NLP applications. In this paper, we explore discourse relations as an alternative set of features to lexico-syntactic patterns. We demonstrate that statistics over discourse relations, collected via explicit discourse markers as proxies, can be utilized as salient indicators for paradigmatic relations in multiple languages, outperforming patterns in terms of recall and F1-score. In addition, we observe that markers and patterns provide complementary information, leading to significant classification improvements when applied in combination.