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An Assessment of Explicit Inter- and Intra-sentential Discourse Connectives in Turkish Discourse Bank

The paper offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of explicit inter- and intra-sentential discourse connectives in Turkish Discourse Bank, or TDB version 1.1, a multi-genre resource of written Turkish manually annotated at the discourse level following the goals and principles of Penn Discourse TreeBank. TDB 1.1 is a 40K-word corpus involving all major discourse relation types (explicit discourse relations at intra- and inter-sentential positions, implicit discourse relations, alternative lexicalizations and entity relations) along with their senses and the text spans they relate. The paper focuses on the addition of a new set of explicit intra-sentential connectives to TDB 1.1, namely converbs (a subset of subordinators), which are suffixal connectives mostly corresponding to subordinating conjunctions in European languages. An evaluation of the converb sense annotations is provided. Then, with corpus statistics, explicit intra- and inter-sentential connectives are compared in terms of their frequency of occurrence and with respect to the senses they convey. The results suggest that the subordinators tend to select certain senses not selected by explicit inter-sentential discourse connectives in the data. Overall, our findings offer a promising direction for future NLP tasks in Turkish.