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...

In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the presence of iron in carbon particulates enhances ultrastructural perturbation in human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) after phagocytosis. We used 1-microm synthetic carbon-based particulates, designed to simulate environmental particulates of mass median aerodynamic diameter < or = 2.5 microm (PM2.5). Cultures of human MDMs or T-lymphocytes ...

Discourse markers ('cue words') are lexical items that signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans; for example, because, since, and for this reason are different markers for causal relations. Discourse markers are a syntactically quite heterogeneous group of words, many of which are traditionally treated as function words belonging to the realm of grammar rather t...