A long-standing linguistic hypothesis asserts that the meanings of words are related to the contexts in which they appear (Miller and Charles 1991). This paper explores this hypothesis by showing that co-occurrences of discourse markers reflect the meanings of the discourse markers themselves. An experiment in classifying discourse markers by their semantic class, e.g. temporal or causal, was c...

Various NLP applications require automatic discourse analysis of texts. For analysis of scientific and technical texts, we propose to use all typical lexical units organizing scientific discourse; we call them common scientific words and expressions, most of them are known as discourse markers. The paper discusses features of scientific discourse, as well as the variety of discourse markers spe...

While there is some evidence that causal discourse relations are processed incrementally, the time-course of comprehending concessive discourse markers (e.g., nevertheless) has hardly been investigated. Given that concessives are often defined as negative causals, there may be similarities between the processing of concessives and negations (e.g., a delay). This paper investigates the time-cour...

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...

A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of backchannel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made. We show that these utterances are characterizable as discourse markers, and that they comprise a well-defined category, characterizable in a regul...

Abstract. With respect to discourse organisation, the most basic way of signalling the speaker’s or writer’s intentions is to use explicit lexical markers: so-called discourse markers or discourse connectives. While a lexicon of discourse connectives associated with the relations they express can be very useful for researchers, especially in Natural Language Processing, few projects aim at coll...