Investigating Explicitation of Discourse Connectives in Translation using Automatic Annotations
Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Pollkläsener, Vera Demberg
Abstract
Discourse relations have different patterns of marking across different languages. As a result, discourse connectives are often added, omitted, or rephrased in translation. Prior work has shown a tendency for explicitation of discourse connectives, but such work was conducted using restricted sample sizes due to difficulty of connective identification and alignment. The current study exploits automatic methods to facilitate a large-scale study of connectives in English and German parallel texts. Our results based on over 300 types and 18000 instances of aligned connectives and an empirical approach to compare the cross-lingual specificity gap provide strong evidence of the Explicitation Hypothesis. We conclude that discourse relations are indeed more explicit in translation than texts written originally in the same language. Automatic annotations allow us to carry out translation studies of discourse relations on a large scale. Our methodology using relative entropy to study the specificity of connectives also provides more fine-grained insights into translation patterns.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigdial-1.2
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Prague, Czechia
- Editors:
- Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 21–30
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.2
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.2
- Cite (ACL):
- Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Pollkläsener, and Vera Demberg. 2023. Investigating Explicitation of Discourse Connectives in Translation using Automatic Annotations. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 21–30, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Investigating Explicitation of Discourse Connectives in Translation using Automatic Annotations (Yung et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2023.sigdial-1.2.pdf