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Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

Researchers Bruno Cartoni, Sandrine Zufferey, and Thomas Meyer propose the translation-spotting technique, which uses translations in large parallel corpora to annotate discourse connectives like 'while' and 'however', replacing traditional sense annotation with empirical clustering of senses. The method, published in Dialogue & Discourse Volume 4 (2013), pages 65–86, aims to provide more reliable reference data and enable rapid creation of large annotated datasets for NLP applications.

read1 min views30 publishedAug 25, 2026
Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique
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Abstract

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.

- Anthology ID:
- 2013.dnd-4.5
- Volume:
- [Dialogue & Discourse Volume 4](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2013.dnd-4/)
- Month:
  • 04
  • Year:
  • 2013
- Address:
- Editors:
- Venue:
- [DND](https://aclanthology.org/venues/dnd/)
- SIG:
- [SIGDIAL](https://aclanthology.org/sigs/sigdial/)
- Publisher:
- Note:
- Pages:
  • 65–86
- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2013.dnd-4.5/](https://aclanthology.org/2013.dnd-4.5/)
- DOI:
- [10.5087/dad.2013.204](https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2013.204)
- Cite (ACL):
- Cite (Informal):
- [Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique](https://aclanthology.org/2013.dnd-4.5/) (Cartoni et al., DND 2013)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2013.dnd-4.5.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2013.dnd-4.5.pdf)
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