In this work, we introduce a lightweight discourse connective detection system. Employing gradient boosting trained on straightforward, low-complexity features, this proposed approach sidesteps the computational demands of the current approaches that rely on deep neural networks. Considering its simplicity, our approach achieves competitive results while offering significant gains in terms of time even on CPU. Furthermore, the stable performance across two unrelated languages suggests the robustness of our system in the multilingual scenario. The model is designed to support the annotation of discourse relations, particularly in scenarios with limited resources, while minimizing performance loss.

The Turkish particle dA is a focus-associated enclitic, and it can act as a discourse connective conveying multiple senses, like additive, contrastive, causal etc. Like many other linguistic expressions, it is subject to usage ambiguity and creates a challenge in natural language automatization tasks. For the first time, we annotate the discourse and non-discourse connnective occurrences of dA in Turkish with the PDTB principles. Using a minimal set of linguistic features, we develop binary classifiers to distinguish its discourse connective usage from its other usages. We show that despite its ability to cliticize to any syntactic type, variable position in the sentence and having a wide argument span, its discourse/non-discourse connective usage can be annotated reliably and its discourse usage can be disambiguated by exploiting local cues.

We introduce the Turkish Emotion-Voice Database (TurEV-DB) which involves a corpus of over 1700 tokens based on 82 words uttered by human subjects in four different emotions (angry, calm, happy, sad). Three machine learning experiments are run on the corpus data to classify the emotions using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model and a support vector machine (SVM) model. We report the performance of the machine learning models, and for evaluation, compare machine learning results with the judgements of humans.

In this work, we present two new bilingual discourse connective lexicons, namely, for Turkish-English and European Portuguese-English created automatically using the existing discourse relation-aligned TED-MDB corpus. In their current form, the Pt-En lexicon includes 95 entries, whereas the Tr-En lexicon contains 133 entries. The lexicons constitute the first step of a larger project of developing a multilingual discourse connective lexicon.

It is known that discourse connectives are the most salient indicators of discourse relations. State-of-the-art parsers being developed to predict explicit discourse connectives exploit annotated discourse corpora but a lexicon of discourse connectives is also needed to enable further research in discourse structure and support the development of language technologies that use these structures for text understanding. This paper presents a lexicon of Turkish discourse connectives built by automatic means. The lexicon has the format of the German connective lexicon, DiMLex, where for each discourse connective, information about the connective‘s orthographic variants, syntactic category and senses are provided along with sample relations. In this paper, we describe the data sources we used and the development steps of the lexicon.

This paper describes an automatic discourse relation alignment experiment as an empirical justification of the planned annotation projection approach to enlarge the 3600-word multilingual corpus of TED Multilingual Discourse Bank (TED-MDB). The experiment is carried out on a single language pair (English-Turkish) included in TED-MDB. The paper first describes the creation of a large corpus of English-Turkish bi-sentences, then it presents a sense-based experiment that automatically aligns the relations in the English sentences of TED-MDB with the Turkish sentences. The results are very close to the results obtained from an earlier semi-automatic post-annotation alignment experiment validated by human annotators and are encouraging for future annotation projection tasks.

This paper presents the recent developments on Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). First, the resource is summarized and an evaluation is presented. Then, TDB 1.1, i.e. enrichments on 10% of the corpus are described (namely, senses for explicit discourse connectives, and new annotations for three discourse relation types - implicit relations, entity relations and alternative lexicalizations). The method of annotation is explained and the data are evaluated.

This study primarily aims to build a Turkish psycholinguistic database including three variables: word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability, where AoA and imageability information are limited to nouns. We used a corpus-based approach to obtain information about the AoA variable. We built two corpora: a child literature corpus (CLC) including 535 books written for 3-12 years old children, and a corpus of transcribed children’s speech (CSC) at ages 1;4-4;8. A comparison between the word frequencies of CLC and CSC gave positive correlation results, suggesting the usability of the CLC to extract AoA information. We assumed that frequent words of the CLC would correspond to early acquired words whereas frequent words of a corpus of adult language would correspond to late acquired words. To validate AoA results from our corpus-based approach, a rated AoA questionnaire was conducted on adults. Imageability values were collected via a different questionnaire conducted on adults. We conclude that it is possible to deduce AoA information for high frequency words with the corpus-based approach. The results about low frequency words were inconclusive, which is attributed to the fact that corpus-based AoA information is affected by the strong negative correlation between corpus frequency and rated AoA.

We report two tools to conduct psycholinguistic experiments on Turkish words. KelimetriK allows experimenters to choose words based on desired orthographic scores of word frequency, bigram and trigram frequency, ON, OLD20, ATL and subset/superset similarity. Turkish version of Wuggy generates pseudowords from one or more template words using an efficient method. The syllabified version of the words are used as the input, which are decomposed into their sub-syllabic components. The bigram frequency chains are constructed by the entire words’ onset, nucleus and coda patterns. Lexical statistics of stems and their syllabification are compiled by us from BOUN corpus of 490 million words. Use of these tools in some experiments is shown.

In this paper, the METU Turkish Discourse Bank Browser, a tool developed for browsing the annotated annotated discourse relations in Middle East Technical University (METU) Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) project is presented. The tool provides both a clear interface for browsing the annotated corpus and a wide range of search options to analyze the annotations.