Constructing a Lexicon of Dutch Discourse Connectives

Abstract

We present a lexicon of Dutch Discourse Connectives (DisCoDict). Its content was obtained using a two-step process, in which we first exploited a parallel corpus and a German seed lexicon, and then manually evaluated the candidate entries against existing connective resources for Dutch, using these resources to complete our lexicon. We compared connective definitions in the research traditions of the two languages and accommodated the differences in our final lexicon. The DisCoDict lexicon is made publicly available, both human- and machine-readable, and targeted at practical use cases in the domain of automatic discourse parsing. It also supports manual investigations of discourse structure and its lexical signals.