Discovery of Ambiguous and Unambiguous Discourse Connectives via Annotation Projection

We present work on tagging German discourse connectives using English training data and a German-English parallel corpus, and report first results towards a more comprehensive approach of doing annotation projection for explicit discourse relations. Our results show that (i) an approach based on a dictionary of connectives currently has advantages over a simpler approach that uses word alignments without further linguistic information, but also that (ii) bootstrapping a connective dictionary using distribution-based heuristics on aligned bitexts seems to be a feasible and low-effort way of creating such a resource. Our best method achieves an F-measure of 68.7% for the identification of discourse connectives without any German-language training data, which is a large improvement over a nontrivial baseline.