Experiments on Sense Annotations and Sense Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives

Discourse connectives can be analyzed as discourse level predicates which project predicate-argument structure on a par with verbs at the sentence level. The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) reflects this view in its design providing annotation of the discourse connectives and their arguments. Like verbs, discourse connectives have multiple senses. We present a set of manual sense annotation studies for three connectives whose arguments have been annotated in the PDTB. Using syntactic features computed from the Penn Treebank and a simple MaxEnt model, we have achieved some success in automatically disambiguating among their senses.