Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

Discourse relations are an important subsystem of text cohesion, which semantically connects both individual sentences, as well as higher units in the text, such as paragraphs. Cf. the example below, representing a confrontative relation between two sentences:

Fuel prices have stabilized in recent months. In contrast, the price of gold continues to rise.

Modeling discourse relations allows, for example, to understand text structure above the sentence level, to evaluate text coherence in specific data, or to improve NLP applications.

In my talk, I will pay special attention to three case studies that pose a challenge for the analysis of discourse relations: (1) implicit discourse relations; (2) semantic underspecification of function words; and (3) individual understanding of discourse relations in relation to models in computational linguistics.

*** The talk will be delivered in person (MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1) and will be streamed via Zoom. For details how to join the Zoom meeting, please write to sevcikova et ufal.mff.cuni.cz ***