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, annota...

The paper presents machine translation experiments from English to Czech with a large amount of manually annotated discourse connectives. The gold-standard discourse relation annotation leads to better translation performance in ranges of 4–60% for some ambiguous English connectives and helps to find correct syntactical constructs in Czech for less ambiguous connectives. Automatic scoring confi...

We describe our efforts to apply the Penn Discourse Treebank guidelines on a Tamil corpus to create an annotated corpus of discourse relations in Tamil. After conducting a preliminary exploratory study on Tamil discourse connectives, we show our observations and results of a pilot experiment that we conducted by annotating a small portion of our corpus. Our ultimate goal is to develop a Tamil D...

There are two conceivable readings for (1). Either (a) it refers to the party or (b) Peter only disliked the food. Discourse grammars like Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) offer an explanation for this phenomenon. SDRT an extension ofDRT (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) describes a complex propositional structure of Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) connected via discourse relati...

after 50 years of  hegemony of  the  mubarak authoritarian discourse in egypt, the people of this country were able to challenge the hegemony of authoritarian discourse. with the fall of the mubarak regime, the muslim brotherhood seized power. a year after  that muslim brotherhood coming to power, the group, due  to the  incompetence in accordance with the political and economic conditions, lac...

Computational approaches to discourse understanding have a two-part goal: (1) identifying those aspects of discourse understanding that require process-based accounts, and (2) characterizing the processes and data structures they involve. To date, in the area of reference, process-based accounts have been developed for reference via anaphoric pronouns and via definite descriptors. In this paper...

In recent proposals for the crucial internal structure of the framing Contextual Component within Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2006, 2008) — for example by Rijkhoff (2008:88-97) and Connolly (2007) —, what is here called text is considered as equivalent to discourse within an account of the NP (Rijkhoff) or of context (Connolly). The article purports to show that this con...