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)

The heterogeneity of procedural meaning

The distinction in relevance theory between two kinds of encoded meaning, conceptual and procedural, has evolved so that more and more components of encoded meaning, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are now taken to be procedural (non-conceptual). I trace these developments and assess the extent to which these diverse elements share properties that distinguish them from concept-expressing words. While the notion of procedural encoding has lost some of its original distinctiveness, it may make sense to think of all encoded meaning as procedural (including the meaning of concept-expressing words), but this necessitates the drawing of new clarifying distinctions among kinds of procedural meaning

Comparison of Surface Language Generators: A Case Study in Choice of Connectives

Language generation systems have used a variety of grammatical formalisms for producing syntactic structure and yet, there has been little research evaluating the formalisms for the specifics of the generation task. In our work at Columbia we have primarily used a unification based formalism, a Functional Unification Grammar (FUG) [Kay 79] and have found it well suited for many of the generation tasks we have addressed. Over the course of the past 5 years we have also explored the use of various off-the-shelf parsing formalisms, including an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) [Woods 70]. a Bottom-Up Chan Parser (BUP) [Finin 84], and a Declarative Clause Grammar (DCG) [Pereira & Warren 80]. In this paper, we identify the characteristics of FDG that we find useful for generation and contrast these with characteristics of the parsing formalisms and with other formalisms that are typically used for generation

Linking discourse marker inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

Linking Discourse Marker Inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

A Contrastive Study of Functional Unification Grammar for Surface Language Generation: A Case Study in Choice of Connectives

Language generation systems have used a variety of grammatical formalisms for producing syntactic structure and yet, there has been little research evaluating the formalisms for the specifics of the generation task. In our work at Columbia we have primarily used a unification based formalism, a Functional Unification Grammar (FUG) [Kay 79] and have found it well suited for many of the generation tasks we have addressed. Over the course of the past 5 years we have also explored the use of various off-the-shelf parsing formalisms, including an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) [Woods 701], a Bottom-Up Chart Parser (SUP) [Finin 84], and a Declarative Clause Grammar (DCG) [Pereira and Warren 80]. In contrast, we have found that parsing formalisms do not have the same benefits for the generation task