In this paper, the concept of possibilistic ev­ idence which is a possibility distribution as well as a body of evidence is proposed over an infinite universe of discourse. The in­ ference with possibilistic evidence is investi­ gated based on a unified inference framework maintaining both the compatibility of con­ cepts and the consistency of the probability logic.

Discourse markers are words or phrases that function as indicators of the structure of discourse by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic. This study reports on the Swedish discourse markers men ‘but’/‘and’ and så ‘so’, their functions and prosodic correlates in dialogue.

Lexical and acoustic markers in spoken language can be used to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition which is often a precursor to dementia and frequently causes some degree of dysphasia. Research to develop such a diagnostic tool for clinicians has been hindered by the scarcity of available data. This work uses domain adaptation to adapt Alzheimer’s data to improve classification...

Sentences form coherent relations in a discourse without discourse connectives more frequently than with connectives. Senses of these implicit discourse relations that hold between a sentence pair, however, are challenging to infer. Here, we employ Brown cluster pairs to represent discourse relation and incorporate coreference patterns to identify senses of implicit discourse relations in natur...

Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annota...

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...

We describe our efforts to apply the Penn Discourse Treebank guidelines on a Tamil corpus to create an annotated corpus of discourse relations in Tamil. After conducting a preliminary exploratory study on Tamil discourse connectives, we show our observations and results of a pilot experiment that we conducted by annotating a small portion of our corpus. Our ultimate goal is to develop a Tamil D...