About Connective-Lex.info

This web app was developed by Felix Dombek as part of a bachelor thesis in computational linguistics under supervision of Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede and Dr. Tatjana Scheffler at Department of Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, 2017.

The work on synchronizing the various lexicons originated as part of the activity of the TextLink COST action (2014–2018) and was subsequently supported by the DFG-funded project Anaphoricity in Connectives: From corpus analysis to lexical description and consequences for discourse parsing (2016-2021).

For more detailed information, and to cite this resource, please use: Manfred Stede, Tatjana Scheffler, and Amália Mendes. Connective-lex: A web-based multilingual lexical resource for connectives. Discours. Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique, 2019.

The DTD to validate XML input lexicons is available here.
For any (other) questions or requests to add or modify lexicons, please contact Peter Bourgonje.

 


Imprint

Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede
Universität Potsdam – Department of Linguistics
Karl-Liebknecht Straße 24-25
Komplex II, Haus 14
14476 Potsdam
Germany

E-mail: stede@uni-potsdam.de

Usage Instructions

  • General Info
  • How To Use
  • The Result List

General Info

This web application enables you to browse several lexicons, or word databases, of connectives, also called discourse markers.

The app can be used with recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera.

Connectives

Connectives are words or short utterances which set two phrases into a relation, e.g. "because", "while", "even though". They belong to various word classes, but are usually either conjunctions (coordinating or subordinating), adverbs/adverbials, or prepositions.

Lexicons

This webapp was created at Universität Potsdam to integrate their own DiMLex lexicon for German connectors and similar lexicons for other languages created at other universities. Each lexicon has a few hundred entries; each entry contains a connective and associated linguistic information, such as syntactic categories (word classes), discourse relations (semantic senses), synonyms and/or examples of their usage, among others.

How To Use

Lexicon Selection

The Lexicon Selection section of the sidebar shows all available lexicons. Select one or more lexicons to browse their entries. Click about for more info about a lexicon.

Search Options

You can filter the displayed lexicon entries according to several criteria:

  • Filter: Enter a word in the text field labelled Filter to only display lexicon entries which contain this word. In the dropdown menu next to the text field, you can select where this word may occur in an entry:
    • Word (default): Only display results whose connective contains the filter word.
    • Word + Synonyms: Only display results whose connective or synonym list contains the filter word.
    • Word + Examples: Only display results whose connective or example list contains the filter word.
    • All: Display all results which contain the filter word in their connective, synonym list, or example list.
  • Syntactic Category: Select one or more word classes to filter by. Hover the mouse over an abbreviation to see which word class it stands for. If none of the checkboxes are selected, the behaviour is the same as if all of them were selected, i.e. connectors of all word classes are displayed in the result list.
  • Discourse Relation (PDTB3): Select one or more semantic senses to filter by. As with the syntactical category, the behaviour if no senses are selected is the same as if all senses were selected. The set of discourse relations we use is the Penn Discourse Treebank 3 (PDTB3) tagset:
    A discourse-annotated corpus of conjoined VPs. Bonnie Webber, Rashmi Prasad, Alan Lee, and Aravind Joshi. Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, ACL, Berlin, Germany. 2016.

The Result List

The result list contains all those elements from all selected lexicons which match the filter settings. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, but there are some not-so-obvious features which are explained here.

Word & variants: A connective can have multiple spellings. Some connectives consist of disconnected parts. These can be specifically searched for by entering ... into the Filter field. Words marked with focus can be used as focus particles.

Syntactical category: Each connective has one or more word classes of which each has one or more senses that the word can have when used as this word class. Hover the mouse over a subtly underlined word class to see the original tagset and word class which this word has in its source lexicon. The original annotations use wildly different tagsets which are mapped to the four main word classes used by this app. Non-underlined word classes have not been changed by the mapping.

Ordering info: For lexicons which include this info, some results contain information about the grammatical context in which a word can be used. If available, this info is listed next to a word class. Some prepositions also have an associated set of cases with which they are used.

Discourse relation: The list of discourse relations for each word class lists the possible semantic senses this word can have when used as this word class. Usually, a word has only one of these semantic senses at a time. In some entries, however, you will see two senses on one line, separated by a +. In this case, the word can have these two senses at once. Similar to the word classes, the senses shown here are mapped from different source tagsets to PDTB3. Hover over an underlined sense to see the original annotation(s).

Connective-Lex.info
  • About / Imprint
  • Help

Lexicon Selection  

Search Options