Logic programming such as Prolog is often sequential and slow because each execution step processes only a single, micro connective. To fix this problem, we propose to usemacro connectives as the means of improving both readability and performance. keywords: Prolog, macro connectives, synthetic connectives.

Discourse connectives can often signal multiple discourse relations, depending on their context. The automatic identification of the Arabic translations of seven English discourse connectives shows how these connectives are differently translated depending on their actual senses. Automatic labelling of English source connectives can help a machine translation system to translate them more corre...

We aim to study the difference of usage between two causal connectives in their semantic context. We present an ongoing study of two Dutch backward causal connectives omdat and want. Previous linguistic research has shown that causal constructions with want are more subjective and often express an opinion. Our hypothesis is that the left and right context surrounding the connectives are more se...

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...