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Implicitness of Discourse Relations

Summary

Torabi Asr and Demberg test whether the readiness of writers to omit a discourse connective reflects how predictable a relation is. Their reasoning rests on the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that a relation readers already anticipate should need no explicit marker. Using the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), which annotates both explicit and implicit connectives in newspaper text, they treat the proportion of implicit realizations as an indicator of expectedness. They then compare this proportion across relation types.

The corpus results match two cognitive claims from earlier experimental work. These are the continuity hypothesis (Segal et al., Murray) and Sanders' causality-by-default hypothesis:

  • Discontinuous relations (e.g., adversatives) and temporally reversed relations receive explicit connectives much more often than continuous, forward-ordered ones.
  • Causal relations make up the largest share of implicit relations.

The authors also checked a local cue, implicit causality (IC) verbs, which supposedly predict an upcoming explanation. Contrary to the UID prediction, IC verbs did not make connectives in reason relations more likely to be dropped. The study is a large-scale naturalistic test of discourse-processing theories. It may also help with automatic recognition of implicit relations.

Key points

  • Data and method: The study uses the PDTB (Prasad et al., 2008). Implicitness ratios are compared for continuous vs. discontinuous, causal vs. non-causal, and forward vs. backward relations.
  • Temporal direction: Causal, concessive and temporal relations are all more often implicit in their forward-ordered version than in the backward version.
  • Causal relations: Causal relations form the largest group of unmarked relations. Restatement and instantiation are also frequent among them, so causality-by-default is only partly supported.
  • IC verb result:
    • IC verbs came from a list of 300 verbs by Ferstl et al. (2011) and were manually checked within reason relations.
    • Reason relations with an IC verb heading Arg1 were implicit 61% of the time (153 implicit vs. 96 explicit).
    • Reason relations with non-IC verbs were implicit 65% of the time.
  • Positive IC finding: IC verbs in Arg1 still tend to signal a reason relation, which agrees with Rohde and Horton (2010).
  • Future work: The authors suggest finer verb-sense disambiguation, use of IC subclasses, and accounting for passive voice.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

30 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 10 of them have a page here, 20 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{asr2012implicitness,
  title = {{Implicitness of Discourse Relations}},
  author = {Asr, Fatemeh Torabi and Demberg, Vera},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2012},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C12-1163/}
}

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