Multiword discourse markers across languages: a linguistic and computational perspective

Abstract

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic expressions that convey different semantic and pragmatic values, managing and organizing the structure of spoken and written discourses. They can be either single-word or multiword expressions (MWE), made up of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Although DMs are the focus of many studies, some questions regarding the interoperability of taxonomies and automatic identification and classification require further research. We aim to tackle these issues by offering a critical analysis and discussing the constitution of a multilingual corpus in 10 languages, i.e., English, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, German, Macedonian, Romanian, Hebrew, Polish, European Portuguese, and Italian. The novel two-level annotation approach is based on (i) signaling the existence or non-existence of DMs in a given text, and (ii) applying the ISO- 24617 standard to annotate the DMs' discourse relation and communicative function in the corpora. Additionally, we introduce prediction models for detecting the presence of DMs within a text.