The Paper is devoted to a corpus study of the Contrast relation between discourse units in Russian. It is based on the data of the Ru-RSTreebank annotated within the framework of the Rhetorical Structure theory [Mann, Thompson 1988]. The research question is what cue phrases and lexical and grammatical patterns are used to express the Contrast relation as opposed to the Comparison relation. Since the simple connectives such as conjunctions а or no “but” and others are ambiguous it may be useful to single out specific cues for the Contrast relation and to find other linguistic features that can also help to differentiate Contrast and other relations, such as Comparison. The investigation of cues signalling different types of relations is an important issue for both automatic discourse mining and the theoretical researches of text coherence. We test several hypotheses presented in the reference literature on Russian against corpus data.
PDF at the Dialogue International conference website: www.dialog-21.ru/media/4635/toldovasplusetal-121.pdf
Higher School of Economics publications: https://publications.hse.ru/en/chapters/359359780
Toldova S., Davydova T., Kobozeva M., Pisarevskaya D. Contrast and Comparison Relations in RST Framework: The Case of Russian // Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: Proceedings of the International Conference “Dialogue 2019”. –2019. – Pages 714-727.