Extended Abstract

Explicit Discourse Connectives / Implicit Discourse Relations

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Abstract

While explicit discourse connectives can signal coherence relations, a common assumption is that only their absence or ambiguity necessitates relation inference. Using a crowdsourced conjunction completion task to collect 40K+ judgments on 50 discourse adverbials, we find this common assumption to be false. Instead, naive subjects systematically infer an implicit connective alongside an explicit discourse adverbial. But sometimes different subsets of subjects may each endorse different connectives. The size of these subsets means that such differences cannot be written off as error. Rather, they demonstrate how the coherence associated with explicit adverbials relates to coherence inferred between the clauses themselves.

Keywords: discourse relations, discourse connectives, inference, conjunction completion task

How to Cite:

Webber, B., Rohde, H., Dickinson, A., Louis, A. & Schneider, N., (2018) “Explicit Discourse Connectives / Implicit Discourse Relations”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 1(1), 229-230. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R50863HJ