A Lexicon of Discourse Markers for Portuguese – LDM-PT

We present LDM-PT, a lexicon of discourse markers for European Portuguese, composed of 252 pairs of discourse marker/rhetorical sense. The lexicon covers conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, adverbial phrases and alternative lexicalizations with a connective function, as in the PDTB (Prasad et al., 2008; Prasad et al., 2010). For each discourse marker in the lexicon, there is information regarding its type, category, mood and tense restrictions over the sentence it introduces, rhetorical sense, following the PDTB 3.0 sense hierarchy (Webber et al., 2016), as well as a link to an English near-synonym and a corpus example. The lexicon is compiled in a single excel spread sheet that is later converted to an XML scheme compatible with the DiMLex format (Stede, 2002). We give a detailed description of the contents and format of the lexicon, and discuss possible applications of this resource for discourse studies and discourse processing tools for Portuguese.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Primary and secondary discourse connectives: definitions and lexicons

Starting from the perspective that discourse structure arises from the presence of coherence relations, we provide a map of linguistic discourse structuring devices (DRDs), and focus on those for written text. We propose to structure these items by differentiating between primary and secondary connectives on the one hand, and free connecting phrases on the other. For the former, we propose that their behavior can be described by lexicons, and we show one concrete proposal that by now has been applied to three languages, with others being added in ongoing work. The lexical representations can be useful both for humans (theoretical investigations, transfer to other languages) and for machines (automatic discourse parsing and generation)

Connective-Lex: A Web-Based Multilingual Lexical Resource for Connectives

In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).Nous présentons dans cet article un résultat tangible du réseau TextLink : un projet conjoint de base de données en ligne, qui montre et relie des lexiques, aussi bien existants que créés récemment, de connecteurs discursifs dans plusieurs langues. Nous commençons par considérer la définition et la délimitation de la classe des connecteurs qui devraient être inclus dans une telle ressource, et nous présentons l’information syntaxique, sémantico-pragmatique et lexicographique que nous avons recueillie. D’autre part, l’implémentation technique de cette base de données et les fonctionnalités de recherche qu’elle permet sont aussi décrites. Nous discutons de quelle manière l’intégration multilingue de plusieurs lexiques de connecteurs apporte une valeur ajoutée aux chercheurs en linguistique et aux autres utilisateurs qui s’intéressent aux connecteurs, en permettant de comparer plusieurs langues et de relier directement les connecteurs dans différentes langues. Pour finir, nous donnons des indications quant à une possible extension future en termes d’ampleur (par exemple, en ajoutant des lexiques pour de nouvelles langues) et de profondeur (en augmentant l’information qui est donnée pour chaque connecteur et en renforçant les liens entre lexiques)