ERIC Number: EJ1194545
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0163-853X
EISSN: N/A
Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, beyond Discourse Markers
Das, Debopam; Taboada, Maite
Discourse Processes: A Multidisciplinary Journal, v55 n8 p743-770 2018
We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) relations. Results from our corpus study show that most relations in text (over 90%) are signalled and also that most signalled relations (over 80%) are indicated not only by discourse markers ("and," "but," "if," "since"), but also by a wide variety of signals other than discourse markers, such as "reference," "lexical," "semantic," "syntactic" and "graphical" features. These findings suggest that signalling of coherence relations is much more sophisticated than previously thought.
Descriptors: Connected Discourse, Discourse Analysis, Computational Linguistics, Newspapers, Form Classes (Languages), Semantics, Syntax, Taxonomy, Language Usage
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A