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.

This paper presents DeDisCo, Georgetown University’s entry in the DISRPT 2025 shared task on discourse relation classification. We test two approaches, using an mt5-based encoder and a decoder based approach using the openly available Qwen model. We also experiment on training with augmented dataset for low-resource languages using matched data translated automatically from English, as well as using some additional linguistic features inspired by entries in previous editions of the Shared Task. Our system achieves a macro-accuracy score of 71.28, and we provide some interpretation and error analysis for our results.