Torabi Asr, Fatemeh
An Information Theoretic Approach to Production and Comprehension of Discourse Markers
Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, 2015.
Discourse relations are the building blocks of a coherent text. The most important linguistic elements for constructing these relations are discourse markers. The presence of a discourse marker between two discourse segments provides information on the inferences that need to be made for interpretation of the two segments as a whole (e.g., because marks a reason).
This thesis presents a new framework for studying human communication at the level of discourse by adapting ideas from information theory. A discourse marker is viewed as a symbol with a measurable amount of relational information. This information is communicated by the writer of a text to guide the reader towards the right semantic decoding. To examine the information theoretic account of discourse markers, we conduct empirical corpus-based investigations, offline crowd-sourced studies and online laboratory experiments. The thesis contributes to computational linguistics by proposing a quantitative meaning representation for discourse markers and showing its advantages over the classic descriptive approaches. For the first time, we show that readers are very sensitive to the fine-grained information encoded in a discourse marker obtained from its natural usage and that writers use explicit marking for less expected relations in terms of linguistic and cognitive predictability. These findings open new directions for implementation of advanced natural language processing systems.