Experiments on Sense Annotations and Sense Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives

Abstract

Discourse connectives can be analyzed as discourse level predicates which projectpredicate-argument structure on a par with verbs at the sentence level. The PennDiscourse Treebank (PDTB) reflects this view in its design providing annotation ofthe discourse connectives and their arguments. Like verbs, discourse connectiveshave multiple senses. We present a set of manual sense annotation studies for threeconnectives whose arguments have been annotated in the PDTB. Using syntacticfeatures computed from the Penn Treebank and a simple MaxEnt model, we haveachieved some success in automatically disambiguating among their senses.