@inproceedings{wu-zeldes-2025-unpacking,
    title = "Unpacking Ambiguity: The Interaction of Polysemous Discourse Markers and Non-{DM} Signals",
    author = "Wu, Jingni  and
      Zeldes, Amir",
    editor = "Strube, Michael  and
      Braud, Chloe  and
      Hardmeier, Christian  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy  and
      Loaiciga, Sharid  and
      Zeldes, Amir  and
      Li, Chuyuan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.codi-1.2/",
    pages = "14--26",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-343-2",
    abstract = "Discourse markers (DMs) like `but' or `then' are crucial for creating coherence in discourse, yet they are often replaced by or co-occur with non-DMs ({`}in the morning' can mean the same as `then'), and both can be ambiguous ({`}since' can refer to time or cause). The interaction mechanism between such signals remains unclear but pivotal for their disambiguation. In this paper we investigate the relationship between DM polysemy and co-occurrence of non-DM signals in English, as well as the influence of genre on these patterns. Using the framework of eRST, we propose a graded definition of DM polysemy, and conduct correlation and regression analyses to examine whether polysemous DMs are accompanied by more numerous and diverse non-DM signals. Our findings reveal that while polysemous DMs do co-occur with more diverse non-DMs, the total number of co-occurring signals does not necessarily increase. Moreover, genre plays a significant role in shaping DM-signal interactions."
}