Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language specific traits of these events (e.g. [6,7,4,3,9]), little has been said on their cross-language behavior and, subsequently, on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse markers. Thus, this work describes new methods and approaches for t...

The literature contains a wealth of theoretical and empirical analyses of discourse marker functions in human communication. Some of these studies address the phenomenon that discourse markers are often multifunctional in a given context, but do not study this in systematic and formal ways. In this paper we show that the use of multiple dimensions in distinguishing and annotating semantic units...

adopting a discourse-pragmatic approach, this study examines the synchronic multifunctionality of the discourse marker hâlâ from the perspective of (inter)subjectification. the findings obtained from the synchronic corpus of colloquial persian indicates that hâlâ has proceeded along the (inter)subjectification cline identified by traugott and dasher (2002), der (2010), and degand and vandenberg...

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there is any relationship between the readers’ profic...

Speech-to-speech translation technology has difficulties processing elements of spontaneity in conversation. We propose a discourse marker attribute in speech corpora to help overcome some of these problems. There have already been some attempts to annotate discourse markers in speech corpora. However, as there is no consistency on what expressions count as discourse markers, we have to reconsi...

Discourse structure and coherence relations are one of the main inferential challenges addressed by computational pragmatics. The present study focuses on discourse markers as key elements in guiding the inferences of the statements in natural language. Through a rule-based approach for the automatic identification, classification and annotation of the discourse markers in a multilingual parall...

The use of discourse structure was shown to be effective in various applications. Meta-discourse is often used as an expression to signal discourse structure. Previous work focused on using the meta-discourse structure in written texts, or spoken material in very clean conditions. This paper presents a metadiscourse annotated corpus in a more challenging educational context. The corpus comprise...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...