Unpacking Ambiguity: The Interaction of Polysemous Discourse Markers and Non-DM Signals
This addresses a linguistic ambiguity issue for natural language processing and discourse analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like eRST.
The study tackled the problem of how ambiguous discourse markers interact with non-discourse marker signals for disambiguation, finding that polysemous discourse markers co-occur with more diverse non-discourse markers but not necessarily more numerous ones, and genre significantly influences these interactions.
Discourse markers (DMs) like 'but' or 'then' are crucial for creating coherence in discourse, yet they are often replaced by or co-occur with non-DMs ('in the morning' can mean the same as 'then'), and both can be ambiguous ('since' can refer to time or cause). The interaction mechanism between such signals remains unclear but pivotal for their disambiguation. In this paper we investigate the relationship between DM polysemy and co-occurrence of non-DM signals in English, as well as the influence of genre on these patterns. Using the framework of eRST, we propose a graded definition of DM polysemy, and conduct correlation and regression analyses to examine whether polysemous DMs are accompanied by more numerous and diverse non-DM signals. Our findings reveal that while polysemous DMs do co-occur with more diverse non-DMs, the total number of co-occurring signals does not necessarily increase. Moreover, genre plays a significant role in shaping DM-signal interactions.