Exploration of Inter- and Intralingual Variation of Discourse Phenomena

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse cross-linguistic variation of discourse phenomena, i.e. coreference, discourse relations and modality. We will show that contrasts in the distribution of these phenomena can be observed across languages, genres, and text production types, i.e. translated and non-translated ones. Translations, regardless of the method they were produced with, are different from their source texts and from the comparable originals in the target language, as it was stated in studies on translationese. These differences can be automatically detected and analysed with exploratory and automatic clustering techniques. The extracted frequencybased profiles of variables under analysis (languages, genres, text production types) can be used in further studies, e.g. in the development and enhancement of MT systems, or in further NLP applications.

Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations

“…This can happen for many reasons: translation lexical choice often involves selecting between near synonyms that introduce language-specific nuances (Hirst, 1995), typological divergences lead to structural mismatches (Dorr, 1994), differences in discourse organization can make it impossible to find oneto-one sentence alignments (Li et al, 2014). Cross-linguistic variations in other discourse phenomena such as coreference, discourse relation and modality (Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015) compounded with translation effects that distinguish "translationese" from original text (Koppel and Ordan, 2011) might also lead to meaning mismatches between source and target.…”

Variation in Coreference Strategies across Genres and Production Media

“…Coreference across genres and media. Various linguistic coreference phenomena have been compared by researchers in different domains such as across languages (Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015;Kunz and Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015;Engell, 2016;Kunz et al, 2016), regional language varieties (Neumann and Fest, 2016), production media (spoken, written, web) (Fox, 1987;Biber, 1992;Amoia et al, 2012) and across genres in these domains. Among the features, frequency-based statistics and distance measurements are most prominent.…”

On Integrating Discourse in Machine Translation

“…In their work on comparative crosslingual discourse phenomena, Lapshinova-Koltunski (2015) find that use of various lexical cohesive devices can vary from language to language, and also depend on genre. In a different context, Mascarell et al (2014) experiment with enforcing lexical consistency at document level for coreferencing compounds.…”