--- title: "Recovering discourse relations — Rohde 2015" description: "Discourse relations may be marked by a connective or left for the reader to infer." authors: ["Hannah Rohde", "Anna Dickinson", "Chris Clark", "Annie Louis", "Bonnie Webber"] year: 2015 venue: "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W15-2703/" doi: "10.18653/v1/w15-2703" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rohde-2015-recovering-discourse-relations-varying-influence/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rohde-2015-recovering-discourse-relations-varying-influence/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2015/page/2/) / Recovering discourse relations: Varying influence of discourse adverbials # Recovering discourse relations: Varying influence of discourse adverbials **Authors:** [Hannah Rohde](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/hannah-rohde/), Anna Dickinson, Chris Clark, [Annie Louis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/annie-louis/), [Bonnie Webber](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/bonnie-webber/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W15-2703/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W15-2703.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/w15-2703](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w15-2703) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1619933502) **Citations:** 13 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [10](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Discourse relations may be marked by a connective or left for the reader to infer. This paper asks whether a reader can perceive an additional, unmarked relation when only one explicit discourse adverbial is present. It also asks whether that relation follows from the adverbial or from the passage content. The authors report Phase I of a crowd-sourcing study that builds on an earlier MSc project by Jiang (2013). The study examines four adverbials, namely *instead*, *in general*, *in fact* and *after all*. Participants saw passages with a gap before the adverbial and chose one of six conjunctions to fill it, or selected None at all or Other. Some passages originally contained a conjunction (explicit), and others had none (implicit). Participants seldom declined to insert a conjunction, and they agreed fairly consistently on their choices. *After all* strongly attracted *because*. The other adverbials yielded passage-dependent choices, so content rather than the adverbial drives the inference. This matters for discourse parsing in Language Technology, which may need to look for implicit relations even when an explicit connective is present. ## Key points - The response options were *and, because, before, but, or, so*, plus None at all and Other. A separate rating let participants flag stylistic awkwardness, which removed the ambiguity of "None" in Jiang's design. Each participant judged 50 passages. - The six conjunctions are largely unambiguous at a coarse level: 86.7–99.6% of their tokens in the Penn Discourse TreeBank carry their dominant sense label. - In implicit passages, None was rare: 26/348 for *after all*, 20/231 for *in fact*, 13/290 for *in general* and 10/290 for *instead*. *After all* drew *because* in 245 of 348 responses. - *Instead* did not mainly attract the contrastive *but* (103 responses); *so* was chosen more often (119). - Mean agreement on the top response was 0.706 for *after all*, 0.581 for *in fact*, 0.503 for *in general* and 0.717 for *instead*. A Google NGRAMS survey guided adverbial selection, and the study ran from August 2014 to June 2015. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/discourse-analysis/) ## Cited by Cited by 10 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 6 not yet. - [Automatic Prediction of Discourse Connectives](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/malmi-2018-automatic-prediction-discourse-connectives/) - [Discourse Coherence: Concurrent Explicit and Implicit Relations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rohde-2018-discourse-coherence-concurrent-explicit-implicit/) - [Examples and Specifications that Prove a Point: Identifying Elaborative and Argumentative Discourse Relations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/scholman-2017-examples-specifications-that-prove-point/) - [Acquiring Annotated Data with Cross-lingual Explicitation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/shi-2019-acquiring-annotated-data-cross-lingual/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{rohde2015recovering, title = {{Recovering discourse relations: Varying influence of discourse adverbials}}, author = {Rohde, Hannah and Dickinson, Anna and Clark, Chris and Louis, Annie and Webber, Bonnie}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics}, year = {2015}, doi = {10.18653/v1/w15-2703}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w15-2703} } ``` - [← previous Reasoning about Entailment with Neural Attention](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rocktaschel-2015-reasoning-about-entailment-neural-attention/) - [next → Removing the Training Wheels: A Coreference Dataset that Entertains Humans and Challenges Computers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/guha-2015-removing-training-wheels-coreference-dataset/) - [↑ back to papers of 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2015/page/2/) ## References 15 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. M.J. Cuenca and M.J. Marin. 2009. Co-occurrence of discourse markers in Catalan and Spanish oral narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(5):899–914. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=M%2EJ%2E+Cuenca+and+M%2EJ%2E+Marin%2E+2009%2E+Co%2Doccurrence+of+discourse+markers+in+Catalan+and+Spanish+oral+narrative%2E+Journal+of+Pragmatics%2C+41%285%29%3A899%E2%80%93914%2E) 2. Bruce Fraser. 2013. Combinations of contrastive discourse markers in english. International Review of Pragmatics, 5:318–340. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bruce+Fraser%2E+2013%2E+Combinations+of+contrastive+discourse+markers+in+english%2E+International+Review+of+Pragmatics%2C+5%3A318%E2%80%93340%2E) 3. G. Gazdar. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. Academic Press, London. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=G%2E+Gazdar%2E+1979%2E+Pragmatics%3A+Implicature%2C+Presupposition%2C+and+Logical+Form%2E+Academic+Press%2C+London%2E) 4. Xi Jiang. 2013. 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