Interpretation of Chinese Discourse Connectives for Explicit Discourse Relation Recognition

This paper addresses the specific features of Chinese discourse connectives, including types (word-pair and single-word), linking directions (forward and backward linking), positions and ambiguous degrees, and discusses how they affect the discourse relation recognition. A semisupervised learning method is proposed to learn the probability distributions of discourse functions of connectives from a small labeled dataset and a big unlabeled dataset. The statistics learned from the dataset demonstrates some interesting linguistic phenomena such as connective synonyms sharing similar distributions, multiple discourse functions of connectives, and couple-linking elements providing strong clues for discourse relation resolution.