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...

A generic method for constructing categorical models of Linear Logic is provided and instantiated to yield traditional models such as coherence spaces, hypercoherences, phase spaces, relations, etc. The generic construction is modular, as expected. Hence we discuss multi-plicative connectives, modalities and additive connectives in turn. Modelling the multiplicative connectives of Linear Logic ...

In this paper, we present a system that automatically generates questions from natural language text using discourse connectives. We explore the usefulness of the discourse connectives for Question Generation (QG) that looks at the problem beyond sentence level. Our work divides the QG task into content selection and question formation. Content selection consists of finding the relevant part in...

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 fro...

DiMLex is a lexicon of German connectives that can be used for various language understanding purposes. We enhanced the coverage to 275 connectives, which we regard as covering all known German discourse connectives in current use. In this paper, we consider the task of adding the semantic relations that can be expressed by each connective. After discussing different approaches to retrieving se...