Automatic Disambiguation of French Discourse Connectives

TL;DR

This paper explores the automatic disambiguation of French discourse connectives, demonstrating that features effective for English can be applied to French with high accuracy.

Contribution

It shows that English-based syntactic and lexical features are effective for French discourse connective disambiguation, achieving 94.2% accuracy.

Findings

Syntactic and lexical features are effective for French disambiguation.

Disambiguation accuracy reaches 94.2%.

Features developed for English work well for French.

Abstract

Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of features proposed for the disambiguation of English discourse connectives for French. Our results with the French Discourse Treebank (FDTB) show that syntactic and lexical features developed for English texts are as effective for French and allow the disambiguation of French discourse connectives with an accuracy of 94.2%.