Refining the meaning of sense labels in PDTB: "concession"

Abstract

The most recent release of PDTB 2.0 contains annotations of senses of connectives. The PDTB 2.0 manual describes the hierarchical set of senses used in the annotation and offers rough semantic descriptions of each label. In this paper, we refine the semantics of concession substantially and offer a formal description of concessive relations and the associated inferences drawn by the reader, utilizing basic notions from Hobbs's logic, including the distinction between causes and causal complexes (Hobbs, 2005). This work is part of a larger project on the semantics of connectives which aims at developing formal descriptions of discourse relations, useful for processing real data.