Abstract
Determining a relative position of a discourse connective and the two arguments (text segments) it connects is an important part of a full discourse parsing task. This paper investigates discourse connectives whose position in a text deviates from the usual setting – namely connectives that occur in neither of the two arguments – and as such present a challenge for discourse parsers. We find syntactic patterns for this phenomenon and describe it linguistically on the basis of Czech discourse-annotated corpus material, with the aim to facilitate an automatic detection of such connectives and a correct localization of their arguments.
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Notes
- 1.
In all examples in the paper, the left-sided argument of a discourse relation is highlighted in italics, the other one in bold, the connective is underlined.
- 2.
In this study, we do not address secondary discourse connectives like that is why or prepositional connectives with nominalized arguments like after his arrival.
- 3.
Some frameworks for discourse analysis, e.g. [6], though, do not allow for a non-adjacent interpretation, such a long-distance relation is non-existent.
- 4.
Note that in Czech, the nicméně–connective (however) is undoubtedly located within the main clause. The English translations of Czech examples are the best possible approximations to the original sentences given the more relaxed word order in Czech, even for the ale–connective (but). Where needed, we use literal translations.
- 5.
The best approximation to finding the relevant connectives was achieved with the following PML-TQ query:
.
- 6.
In an earlier phase of this research, we called the phenomenon connective movement. A colleague later pointed out the possible confusing connection of this term with generative grammar in sense of N. Chomsky, which we do not want to make here, so we abandoned the use of this term.
- 7.
As Czech is a pro-drop language, we did not need to search for a pronominal subject in this case.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (projects 20-09853S and 17-03461S). The research reported in the present contribution has been using language resources developed, stored and distributed by the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ project of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (project no. LM2018101).
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Poláková, L., Mírovský, J. (2023). Connectives with Both Arguments External: A Survey on Czech. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24337-0_5
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