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

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.