Ebru Ersöyleyen


2023

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Annotating and Disambiguating the Discourse Usage of the Enclitic dA in Turkish
Ebru Ersöyleyen | Deniz Zeyrek | Fırat Öter
Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)

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.