Capturing variation of discourse relations in English parallel data through automatic annotation and alignment

Christina Pollkläsener, Frances Yung, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski

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We present a study of discourse connectives and discourse relations in English parallel texts, i.e. in written and spoken originals, as well as translation and interpreting from German. For this, we apply automatic procedures to annotate discourse connectives and relations they trigger in a parallel corpus. We look at distributions of various connectives and discourse relations, comparing spoken and written mode, as well as original and translated or interpreted language production. Furthermore, we analyse the translation patterns in terms of translation entropy. We link our observations to the phenomena of explicitation and implicitation. We find that in both interpreting and translation, explicitation and implicitation patters are affected by the cognitive complexity of the discourse relation signalled by the connective. Moreover, we also show that the difference in the specificity of the same connectives in interpreting and translation also depends on the type of relation they trigger.