Inducing Discourse Marker Inventories from Lexical Knowledge Graphs.

Discourse marker inventories are lexical resources that define the meaning of discourse cues (discourse markers) in terms of associated discourse relation types. They are thus important tools for the development of both discourse parsers and corpora with discourse annotations. This paper explores the potential of massively multilingual lexical knowledge graphs to induce multilingual discourse marker lexicons by means of propagation methods. Given one or multiple source language discourse marker inventories and a large number of bilingual dictionaries to link them - directly or indirectly - with the target language, we study to what extent discourse marker induction can benefit from the integration of information from different sources, the impact of sense granularity and what limiting factors may need to be considered. Our study uses discourse marker inventories from nine European languages normalized against the discourse relation inventory of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), as well as three collections of machine-readable dictionaries with different characteristics, so that the interplay of a large number of factors can be studied.