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Using a Discourse Bank and a Lexicon for the Automatic Identification of Discourse Connectives

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Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11122))

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Abstract

We describe two new resources that have been prepared for European Portuguese and how they are used for discourse parsing: the Portuguese subpart of the TED-MDB corpus, a multilingual corpus of TED Talks that has been annotated in the PDTB style, and the Lexicon of Discourse Markers for Portuguese (LDM-PT). Both lexicon and corpus are used in a preliminary experiment for discourse connective identification in texts. This includes, in many cases, the difficult task of disambiguating between connective and non-connective uses. We annotated the PT-TED-MDB corpus with POS, lemma and syntactic constituency and focus on the 10 most frequent connectives in the corpus. The best approach considers word-form+POS+syntactic annotation and leads to 85% precision.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://ec2-18-219-79-53.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com:8000/ted_mdb/.

  2. 2.

    Nominalizations (e.g., the destruction of the city) can be considered as equivalent to clauses and part of the discourse level, as in the PDTB (although few such cases are actually annotated), so that coordinating conjunctions connecting nominalizations would have to be identified as discourse connectives.

  3. 3.

    Also, dependency analysis is not available in the upload interface of PALAVRAS.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (under the project PEst-OE/LIN/UI0214/2013), and some of its developments were implemented in the scope of the COST Action TextLink – Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lisbon, Center of Linguistics-CLUL, Lisbon, Portugal

    Amália Mendes & Iria del Río

Authors
  1. Amália Mendes
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  2. Iria del Río
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amália Mendes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Aline Villavicencio

  2. Instituto de Informática - UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Viviane Moreira

  3. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Alberto Abad

  4. UFSCAR, Sao Carlos, Brazil

    Helena Caseli

  5. Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain

    Pablo Gamallo

  6. Université de Toulon, Parc Scientifique Technologique Luminy, Marseille, France

    Carlos Ramisch

  7. Centro de Informática e Sistemas, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

  8. Federal University of Technology, Dois Vizinhos, Paraná, Brazil

    Gustavo Henrique Paetzold

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Mendes, A., del Río, I. (2018). Using a Discourse Bank and a Lexicon for the Automatic Identification of Discourse Connectives. In: Villavicencio, A., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_22

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99722-3

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