Jet Hoek

The Role of Expectedness in the Implicitation and Explicitation of Discourse Relations

Translation of discourse connectives varies more in human translations than in machine translations. Building on Murray’s (1997) continuity hypothesis and Sanders’ (2005) causality-by-default hypothesis we investigate whether expectedness influences the degree of implicitation and explicitation of discourse relations. We manually analyze how source text connectives are translated, and where connectives in target texts come from. We establish whether relations are explicitly signaled in the other language as well, or whether they have to be reconstructed by inference. We demonstrate that the amount of implicitation and explicitation of connectives in translation is influenced by the expectedness of the relation a connective signals. In addition, we show that the types of connectives most often added in translation are also the ones most often deleted.

Segmenting discourse: Incorporating interpretation into segmentation?

Abstract Discourse segmentation is an important step in the process of annotating coherence relations. Ideally, implementing segmentation rules results in text segments that correspond to the units of thought related to each other. This paper demonstrates that accurate segmentation is in part dependent on the propositional content of text fragments, and that completely separating segmentation and annotation does not always yield text segments that correspond to the text units between which a conceptual relationship holds. In addition, it argues that elements belonging to the propositional content of the discourse should necessarily be included in the segmentation, but that inclusion of other text elements, for instance stance markers, should be optional.