Evaluating the degree of discourse relations semantic affinity: Methods and instruments

The methods for evaluating semantic affinity of discourse relations are examined. The authors propose several approaches to this problem using two information resources: a collection of structured definitions of logical-semantic relations (LSRs) formed by the authors and the Supracorpora Database of Connectives incorporating corpus-based annotations of translation correspondences that include text fragments with LSR markers in Russian, French, and Italian. It is demonstrated that when it comes to assessing the semantic affinity of LSRs, the following factors will be of a higher priority: affiliation of distinctive features of LSRs with the same family in the structured definitions of relations; correspondences between markers of different LSRs in the source and target texts; and cases when different LSRs are regularly expressed by the same markers in different contexts. Of a lesser importance is the factor of compatibility of different LSRs within the same context. It is assumed that based on the proposed methods, it will become possible to specify more precisely which distinguishing features of LSRs have the greatest impact on their potential semantic affinity.