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LEXCONN: A French Lexicon of Discourse Connectives

Summary

Explicit connectives such as "so" or "after all" are the most direct signal of how the parts of a text relate. They help both human readers and automatic discourse analysers pick the intended relation. Comparable inventories already existed for English, Spanish and German, but French had none. The authors built LEXCONN by hand. They began with roughly 600 candidates pooled from lists of conjunctions and prepositions, the ANNODIS marker list, and a manual translation of Knott's English inventory. They then filtered these candidates with syntactic, semantic and discourse tests and checked actual usage against examples from the FRANTEXT literary corpus. Each retained item receives a syntactic category and one or more relations from Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), each marked as coordinating or subordinating. The final lexicon lists 328 French connectives. The work also exposed gaps in SDRT: six extra relations had to be introduced, mostly borrowed from RST, and some connectives fit no relation at all. The resource is meant to support French discourse annotation and NLP-based discourse parsing.

Key points

  • LEXCONN contains 328 French discourse connectives, narrowed down from about 600 candidates. It is presented as the first such lexicon for French, following earlier work for English (Knott, 1996), Spanish and German.
  • Connectives are classed as coordinating conjunctions (cco), subordinating conjunctions (csu), prepositions (prep) or adverbs (adv). Three tests were used for filtering: the Cleft, Substitutability and Compositionality criteria.
  • By number of associated connectives, the most common relations are Opposition (9.5%), Result (8.1%), and Concession and Continuation (7.4% each).
  • Six relations absent from SDRT were added: Concession, Opposition, Summary, Detachment, Digression and Rephrasing. For example, bien que and même si were assigned subordinating Concession rather than Contrast.
  • 21 connectives (about 6%), such as à mesure que, en fait and quant à, are labelled "unknown" because no available relation captures their meaning.

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

52 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 10 of them have a page here, 42 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/discours.8645

@inproceedings{roze2012lexconn,
  title = {{LEXCONN: A French Lexicon of Discourse Connectives}},
  author = {Roze, Charlotte and Danlos, Laurence and Muller, Philippe},
  booktitle = {Discours 10},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.4000/discours.8645},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/discours.8645}
}

References

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