In this work, we present two new bilingual discourse connective lexicons, namely, for Turkish-English and European Portuguese-English created automatically using the existing discourse relation-aligned TED-MDB corpus. In their current form, the Pt-En lexicon includes 95 entries, whereas the Tr-En lexicon contains 133 entries. The lexicons constitute the first step of a larger project of developing a multilingual discourse connective lexicon.
The single biggest obstacle in performing comprehensive cross-lingual discourse analysis is the scarcity of multilingual resources. The existing resources are overwhelmingly monolingual, compelling researchers to infer the discourse-level information in the target languages through error-prone automatic means. The current paper aims to provide a more direct insight into the cross-lingual variations in discourse structures by linking the annotated relations of the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank, which consists of independently annotated six TED talks in seven different languages. It is shown that the linguistic labels over the relations annotated in the texts of these languages can be automatically linked with English with high accuracy, as verified against the relations of three diverse languages semi-automatically linked with relations over English texts. The resulting corpus has a great potential to reveal the divergences in local discourse relations, as well as leading to new resources, as exemplified by the induction of bilingual discourse connective lexicons.
This paper contributes to the question of how discourse relations are realised in TED talks. Drawing on an annotated, multilingual discourse corpus of TED talk transcripts, we examine discourse relations in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations by concentrating on three aspects: the degree of explicitness in discourse relations, the extent to which explicit and implicit relations are encoded inter- or intra-sententially, and whether top-level discourse relation senses employed in English differ in the target languages. The study shows that while the target languages differ from English in the first two dimensions, they do not display considerable differences in the third dimension. The paper thus reveals variations in the realisation of discourse relations in translated transcripts of a spoken genre in three languages and offers some methodological insights for dealing with the issues surrounding discourse relations.
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