Automatic Disambiguation of French Discourse Connectives

Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage and non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of features proposed for the disambiguation of English discourse connectives for French. Our results with the French Discourse Treebank (FDTB) show that syntactic and lexical features developed for English texts are as effective for French and allow the disambiguation of French discourse connectives with an accuracy of 94.2%.