Processing discourse connectives is important for tasks such as discourse parsing and generation. For these tasks, it is useful to know which connectives can signal the same coherence relations. This paper presents experiments into modelling the substitutability of discourse connectives. It shows that substitutability effects distributional similarity. A novel variancebased function for compari...

Abstract Language users have preferences for the connectives they choose to express causal relations. These choices may depend on subjectivity involved in relation. Dutch illustrate this situation clearly: want (‘since/for’) is preferred typically expressing subjective relations and omdat (‘because’) objective ones. While various corpus-based studies revealed a similar pattern other languages, ...

Abstract. D-LTAG is a discourse-level extension of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG), in which discourse syntax is projected by different types of discourse connectives and discourse interpretation is a product of compositional rules, anaphora resolution, and inference. In this paper, we present a D-LTAG extension of ongoing work on an LTAG syntaxsemantic interface. First, we show how p...

In the volume under review, papers by eleven authors are included which were presented at the international conferenceConnectives asDiscourse Landmarks (University of Paris-Diderot, May 2005). emain point of interest of present studies are syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of several discourse connectives in English. e term ‘connective’ is being used in a broad sense, without specif...

In this paper we explore the possibility of using automatic techniques to analyze the use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of two techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis , the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were studied. The method of analysis is described. It is found that differences that have been suggested in th...

Discourse connectives can be analyzed as discourse level predicates which project predicate-argument structure on a par with verbs at the sentence level. The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) reflects this view in its design providing annotation of the discourse connectives and their arguments. Like verbs, discourse connectives have multiple senses. We present a set of manual sense annotation stud...

Combined connectives arise in combined logics. In fibrings, such combined connectives are known as shared connectives and inherit the logical properties of each component. A new way of combining connectives (and other language constructors of propositional nature) is proposed by inheriting only the common logical properties of the components. A sound and complete calculus is provided for reason...

Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage and non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we inves...

This thesis considers the automatic acquisition of knowledge about discourse connectives. It focuses in particular on their semantic properties, and on the relationships that hold between them. There is a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work on discourse connectives. For example, Knott (1996) motivates a taxonomy of discourse connectives based on relationships between them, such ...

In this paper we examine the issues that arise from the annotation of the discourse connectives for the Chinese Discourse Treebank Project. This project is based on the same principles as the PDTB, a project that annotates the English discourse connectives in the Penn Treebank. The paper begins by outlining range of discourse connectives under consideration in this project and examines the dist...