Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
8-2009
Document Type
Conference Paper
Recommended Citation
Emily Pitler and Ani Nenkova, "Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text", . August 2009.
Abstract
Discourse connectives are words or phrases such as once, since, and on the contrary that explicitly signal the presence of a discourse relation. There are two types of ambiguity that need to be resolved during discourse processing. First, a word can be ambiguous between discourse or non-discourse usage. For example, once can be either a temporal discourse connective or a simply a word meaning “formerly”. Secondly, some connectives are ambiguous in terms of the relation they mark. For example since can serve as either a temporal or causal connective. We demonstrate that syntactic features improve performance in both disambiguation tasks. We report state-of-the-art results for identifying discourse vs. non-discourse usage and human-level performance on sense disambiguation.
Date Posted: 30 July 2012
Comments
Pitler, E. & Nenkova, A., Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text, 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, Aug. 2009, doi: anthology/P09-2004