Discourse Markers and Disfluencies: Integrating Functional and Formal Annotations

Crible, Ludivine
(2016) Proceedings of the 12th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation — 38-44, published

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  • Crible, LudivineUCLouvain
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Abstract
While discourse markers (DMs) and (dis)fluency have been extensively studied in the past as independent phenomena, combining DM-level and disfluency-level annotations however has never been carried out before at a fine-grained level of informativeness. It is argued that the integration of formal and functional annotations, while facing a number of methodological and theoretical challenges, is not only possible and innovative (addressing the lack of consensus in the field) but also highly relevant to the investigation of form-meaning patterns. This paper reports the methodological aspects of an annotation protocol which integrates formal identification of (dis)fluency markers and a multi-layered description of discourse markers featuring, among others, semantic-pragmatic variables such as their domain and function in context. The challenges and merits of this integration are illustrated by a comparison of clustering tendencies between different functions of DMs in DisFrEn, a French-English comparable dataset. Quantitative results allow us to generate tentative interpretations of the relative fluency of some DM functions based on co-occurrence patterns, in line with a cognitive-functional approach to spoken language.
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Crible, L. (2016). Discourse Markers and Disfluencies: Integrating Functional and Formal Annotations. In Harry Bunt (ed.), Proceedings of the 12th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (pp. 38-44). Harry Bunt. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/226948