Discourse Connectives: Complexity of Dependencies at the Discourse Level and at the Sentence Level
Aravind K. Joshi, University of Pennsylvania, USA
What aspects of sentence structure, if any, are carried over to the discourse level and conversely? Further, what aspects of discourse structure suggest a possibly different perspective on the sentence structure itself? These are some of the issues I will discuss in the context of an annotated corpus, the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), a corpus in which we have annotated the discourse connectives (explicit and implicit) and their arguments together with "attributions" of the arguments and the relations denoted by the connectives, and also the senses of the connectives. I hope some of these aspects of discourse structure will be relevant to speech and language technology.