Measuring the Strength of Linguistic Cues for Discourse Relations

Discourse relations in the recent literature are typically classified as either explicit (e.g., when a discourse connective like “because” is present) or implicit. This binary treatment of implicitness is advantageous for simplifying the explanation of many phenomena in discourse processing. On the other hand, linguists do not yet agree as to what types of textual particles contribute to revealing the relation between any pair of sentences or clauses in a text. At one extreme, we can claim that every single word in either of the sentences involved can play a role in shaping a discourse relation. In this work, we propose a measure to quantify how good a cue a certain textual element is for a specific discourse relation, i.e., a measure of the strength of discourse markers. We will illustrate how this measure becomes important both for modeling discourse relation construction as well as developing automatic tools for identifying discourse relations.