Realization of Discourse Relations by Other Means: Alternative Lexicalizations

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, annotated as AltLex (alternative lexicalizations) in the PDTB 2.0. Further analysis of AltLex annotation suggests that the set of markers is openended, and drawn from a wider variety of syntactic types than currently assumed. As a first attempt towards automatically identifying discourse relation markers, we propose the use of syntactic paraphrase methods.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Rashmi Prasad, Aravind K. Joshi, Bonnie L. Webber
• Keywords: COLING 2010, Computational Linguistics, Discourse Relation, Discourse Relation Annotations, Discourse Relation Markers