Multiple discourse marker occurrence: creating hierarchies for natural language generation
Sarah Louise Oates · 2000
Most studies on discourse markers implicitly assume that only one marker or discourse relation will occur in a sentence. In reality, more than one relation may hold between text spans and may be cued by multiple discourse markers. We describe here a method for hierarchically organising discourse markers. The hierarchies are intended for use by a generation system to enable the selection and placement of more than one marker in a single text span. 1 Introduction The majority of studies on discourse markers implicitly assume that only one marker or discourse relation will occur in a sentence or that the presence of multiple markers will not affect the choice and placement of others. However, in reality, more than one relation may hold between text spans which may be cued by multiple markers. The available rules describing the occurrence, choice and placement of a given marker do not account for multiple marker occurrence (Grote et al., 1995; Webber and Joshi, 1998; Power et al., 1999, ...