---
title: "Cross-Lingual Identification of Ambiguous — Zhou 2012"
description: "The paper tackles the identification of explicit discourse connectives in Chinese, a language that lacked a public discourse-annotated corpus."
authors: ["Lanjun Zhou", "Wei Gao", "Binyang Li", "Zhongyu Wei", "Kam-Fai Wong"]
year: 2012
venue: "Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/C12-2138/"
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/zhou-2012-cross-lingual-identification-ambiguous-discourse/"
---
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# Cross-Lingual Identification of Ambiguous Discourse Connectives for Resource-Poor Language

**Authors:** [Lanjun Zhou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/lanjun-zhou/), [Wei Gao](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/wei-gao/), [Binyang Li](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/binyang-li/), [Zhongyu Wei](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/zhongyu-wei/), [Kam-Fai Wong](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/kam-fai-wong/) · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters · **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/C12-2138/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C12-2138.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W368657786)

**Citations:** 13 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [9](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper tackles the identification of explicit discourse connectives in Chinese, a language that lacked a public discourse-annotated corpus. It addresses two kinds of ambiguity: whether a word is used as a connective at all, and which relation sense it signals. The authors propose a language-independent, cross-lingual pipeline built on English resources. First, English connectives from PDTB2 are translated with a bilingual dictionary and expanded with Chinese synonyms. Next, each Chinese candidate's sense ambiguity is scored as the entropy of a relation distribution. That distribution is projected from the English connectives aligned to the candidate in parallel data, and a threshold (max-e) filters out the noisiest candidates. Finally, a co-training scheme with an English view and a Chinese view separates discourse from non-discourse uses. It starts from PDTB2 labels and gradually absorbs unlabeled Chinese instances. For evaluation, the authors built DTBC, a new Chinese discourse corpus. The filtered lexicon and the co-training classifier clearly beat dictionary-only and machine-translation baselines. This shows that useful discourse tools can be bootstrapped for resource-poor languages.

## Key points
- **DTBC**: 500 news articles from Penn Chinese Tree Bank 6 (CTB6), annotated with 2,549 explicit relations, including connectives and arguments.
- **Lexicon quality**: the entropy-filtered lexicon (DIC+ENT, 231 entries) reached F = 0.7773 (precision 0.8615). The raw dictionary list (561 entries) scored F = 0.6675. Over 30% of Chinese candidates turned out to be sense-ambiguous.
- **Explicit relation classification on DTBC**: DIC+ENT achieved F = 0.7481 with max-e = 0.3, tuned on 20% of DTBC. The best baseline, DIC-1, reached F = 0.6827, and the MT-based approach reached F = 0.5825.
- **Discourse-usage identification**: co-training with added lexical and word-alignment features (COT-2) obtained accuracy 0.7428 and F = 0.7933. The connective-only baseline scored 0.2470 / 0.3961, and MT-2 scored 0.6404 / 0.6814. Frequent words such as 和 and 在 rarely function as connectives, which makes this task harder in Chinese than in English.
- **Tools and resources**: the pipeline uses PDTB2 top-level senses (Temporal, Contingency, Comparison, Expansion), Baidu Translator, Stanford Parser, MALLET, and the extended Chinese synonym list of Che et al. (2010).

*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

9 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 7 not yet.

- [Shallow Discourse Parsing for Under-Resourced Languages: Combining Machine Translation and Annotation Projection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/gathje-2020-shallow-discourse-parsing-under-resourced/)
- [Inducing Discourse Connectives from Parallel Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/laali-2014-inducing-discourse-connectives-parallel-texts/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{zhou2012cross,
  title = {{Cross-Lingual Identification of Ambiguous Discourse Connectives for Resource-Poor Language}},
  author = {Zhou, Lanjun and Gao, Wei and Li, Binyang and Wei, Zhongyu and Wong, Kam-Fai},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2012: Posters},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C12-2138/}
}
```

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