Elizabeth Marshman

Portability of cause–effect relation markers across specialised domains and text genres: a comparative evaluation

Lexical knowledge patterns are effective tools for identifying knowledge in corpora. As refining pattern sets is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process, re-use of patterns in subsequent research is common. The portability of patterns from one domain or corpus to another has nevertheless been questioned, although not widely evaluated. This analysis focussed on occurrences of a set of thirty-seven verbal markers of cause–effect relations in three corpora of French texts in the fields of computing, medicine and psychology. These corpora also represented two text genres: specialised and popularised/didactic. We analysed the relative frequencies of these markers and the types of relationships they expressed (specifically, those that involved a cause–effect component versus those that did not). In so doing, we aimed to evaluate and compare the markers’ occurrences with a view to shedding light on the possibilities for using markers to semi-automatically identify knowledge-rich contexts in different domai...