Many discourse connectives also have nondiscourse, or sentential readings. Therefore, for automatic discourse structure analysis, there arises a disambiguation problem even before the question of signalled discourse relation beomes relevant. We focus here on a set of nine German connectives and characterize the task of determining their discourse/sentential reading. Starting from an analysis of...

The paper presents machine translation experiments from English to Czech with a large amount of manually annotated discourse connectives. The gold-standard discourse relation annotation leads to better translation performance in ranges of 4–60% for some ambiguous English connectives and helps to find correct syntactical constructs in Czech for less ambiguous connectives. Automatic scoring confi...

Many discourse connectives can signal several types of relations between sentences. Their automatic disambiguation, i.e. the labeling of the correct sense of each occurrence, is important for discourse parsing, but could also be helpful to machine translation. We describe new approaches for improving the accuracy of manual annotation of three discourse connectives (two English, one French) by u...

An important aspect of discourse understanding and generation involves the recognition and processing of discourse relations. These are conveyed by discourse connectives, i.e., lexical items like because and as a result or implicit connectives expressing an inferred discourse relation. The Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) provides annotations of the argument structure, attribution and semantics o...

Cumulative logics are studied in an abstract setting, i.e., without connectives, very much in the spirit of Makinson’s [11] early work. A powerful representation theorem characterizes those logics by choice functions that satisfy a weakening of Sen’s property α, in the spirit of the author’s [9]. The representation results obtained are surprisingly smooth: in the completeness part the choice fu...

For each ternary propositional connective, we determine the minimum number of binary connectives needed to construct a logically equivalent formula. In order to reduce this problem to a computably feasible one, we prove a number of lemmas showing that every element of a large set of formulas is logically equivalent to a formula in a much smaller associated set. Acknowledgements: Professor Jeffr...

The effects of ethidium bromide were tested on isolated cockroach interganglionic connectives, either with the perineurium intact or desheathed. Intact connectives showed small, reversible depolarizations in response to 25 mM-ethidium. Desheathed connectives showed much larger, concentration-dependent depolarizations and the membrane potentials repolarized only slowly after washing out ethidium...

For deriving information on text structure (in the sense of coherence relations holding between neighbouring text spans), connectives are the most useful source of evidence on the text surface. However, many potential connectives also have a non-connective reading, and thus a disambiguation step is necessary. This problem has received only relatively little attention so far. We present the resu...