Cross-linguistic analysis of discourse variation across registers

Abstract

The present study deals with variation in discourse relations in different registers of English and German. Our previous analyses have been concerned with the systemic contrasts between English and German, cf. Kunz & Steiner (2013 a/b), Kunz & Lapshinova (to appear) and have addressed some cross-linguistic differences with regard to textual realizations of selected subtypes of cohesion. In our current work, our focus is on the empirical analysis of cross-linguistic variation between registers. In order to obtain a more comprehensive picture, we investigate three main types of cohesion in combination: co-reference, substitution and conjunction and their subtypes, cf. Halliday & Hasan (1976). We extract instantiations of cohesive devices from an English-German corpus of spoken and written registers. The data is analyzed with statistical procedures which show that subcorpora can be grouped along particular combinations of cohesive devices.

Acquiring Annotated Data with Cross-lingual Explicitation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

“…The over-representation of Expansion.Conjunction relation in German indicates that German translators tend to use more explicit cues to mark these relations. This is an independently discovered well-known finding from the literature (Kunz and Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015), which observed that German tends to mark conjunction relations with discourse cues, while English tends to use coreference instead. We also find that Expansion.Restatement relations are underrepresented in our back-translation method, indicating that these relations are explicitated particularly rarely in translation.…”

Analysing Coreference in Transformer Outputs

“…Thus, the means of expressing reference differ across languages and genres. This has been shown by some studies in the area of contrastive linguistics (Kunz et al, 2017a;Kunz and Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015;Kunz and Steiner, 2012). Analyses in cross-lingual coreference resolution (Grishina, 2017;Grishina and Stede, 2015;Novák anď Zabokrtský, 2014;Green et al, 2011) show that there are still unsolved problems that should be addressed.…”

Annotating a broad range of anaphoric phenomena, in a variety of genres: the ARRAU Corpus

“…For example, our news documents are taken from the RST treebank and thus further annotations can be induced from RST to investigate possible interactions between coreference and rhetorical structure. 16 The ONTONOTES dataset, on the contrary, provides valuable gold annotations of low-level phenomena (for example, gold part-of-speech tags or parse trees), but does not, to our knowledge, provide deep discourse-level annotations apart from coreference. 17 We believe that a careful analysis of the overlapping documents, annotated within both the ARRAU and ONTONOTES schemes, will provide valuable insights for computational modeling of coreference/anaphora.…”

“…Moreover, the ACE guidelines focus on specific semantic types of referential mentions, motivated from an Information Extraction perspective: person, organization, location and so on 16. We do not provide RST annotations with the ARRAU distributions.…”