Translating Implicit Discourse Connectives Based on Cross-lingual Annotation and Alignment

Abstract

Implicit discourse connectives and relations are distributed more widely in Chinese texts, when translating into English, such connectives are usually translated explicitly. Towards ChineseEnglish MT, in this paper we describe cross-lingual annotation and alignment of discourse connectives in a parallel corpus, describing related surveys and findings. We then conduct some evaluation experiments to testify the translation of implicit connectives and whether representing implicit connectives explicitly in source language can improve the final translation performance significantly. Preliminary results show it has little improvement by just inserting explicit connectives for implicit relations.