ISO-based Annotated Multilingual Parallel Corpus for Discourse Markers

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2739–2749 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2739 ISO-based Annotated Multilingual Parallel Corpus for Discourse Markers Purificação Silvano†, Mariana Damova⋆, Giedr˙e Val¯unait˙e Oleškeviˇcien˙e⊙ Chaya Liebeskind⋄, Christian Chiarcos∗,+, Dimitar Trajanov◦ Ciprian-Octavian Truic˘a§,‡ Elena-Simona Apostol§,‡, Anna B ˛aczkowska× †Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Centre of Linguistics of the University of Porto ⋆Mozaika, Ltd. ⊙Mykolas Romeris University ⋄Jerusalem College of Technology ∗Applied Computational Linguistics, Goethe-Universität + Institute for Digital Humanities, Universität zu Köln ◦Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University §Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University ‡Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest ×Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdansk †Porto, Portugal; ⋆Sofia, Bulgaria; ⊙Vilnius, Lithuania; ⋄Jerusalem, Israel; ∗Frankfurt am Main, Germany; +Cologne, Germany; ◦Skopje, North Macedonia; §Uppsala, Sweden; ‡Bucure¸sti, Romania; ×Gda´nsk, Poland †msilvano@letras.up.pt, ⋆mariana.damova@mozajka.co, ⊙gvalunaite@mruni.eu, ⋄liebchaya@gmail.com, ∗chiarcos@cs.uni-frankfurt.de, ◦dimitar.trajanov@finki.ukim.mk, §ciprian-octavian.truica@it.uu.se, ‡elena.apostol@upb.ro, ×anna.k.baczkowska@gmail.com Abstract Discourse markers carry information about the discourse structure and organization, and also signal local dependencies or epistemological stance of speaker. They provide instructions on how to interpret the discourse, and their study is paramount to understand the mechanism underlying discourse organization. This paper presents a new language resource, an ISO-based annotated multilingual parallel corpus for discourse markers. The corpus comprises nine languages, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, German, European Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, Polish, and Macedonian, with English as a pivot language. In order to represent the meaning of the discourse markers, we propose an annotation scheme of discourse relations from ISO 24617-8 with a plug-in to ISO 24617-2 for communicative functions. We describe an experiment in which we applied the annotation scheme to assess its validity. The results reveal that, although some extensions are required to cover all the multilingual data, it provides a proper representation of discourse markers value. Additionally, we report some relevant contrastive phenomena concerning discourse markers interpretation and role in discourse. This first step will allow us to develop deep learning methods to identify and extract discourse relations and communicative functions, and to represent that information as Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD). Keywords: multilingual corpus, discourse markers, ISO-based annotation scheme, discourse relations, communicative functions 1. Introduction The notion of discourse marker (Zwicky, 1985; Schiffrin, 1987; Lenk, 1998) is an elusive and fuzzy concept. The term is often used interchangeably with, inter alia, discourse particle (Schourup, 1985; Kroon, 1995), pragmatic marker (Fraser, 1996; Aijmer et al., 2006), pragmatic particle (Östman, 1981) or discourse connective (Blakemore, 2006). In earlier studies, dis- course markers were studied from a structural, dis- course organization perspective, while more recent in- vestigations also focus on their role as establishing lo- cal dependencies (Prasad et al., 2008), and on the epis- temic stance they may encode, thus following an atti- tudinal or affective perspective (Sanders et al., 1992; B ˛aczkowska, 2016). Regardless of the adopted defini- tion or theoretical approach, discourse markers provide instructions on how to interpret the discourse (Crible and Zufferey, …

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