Disambiguating Temporal-Contrastive Discourse Connectives for Machine Translation

Temporal–contrastive discourse connectives (although, while, since, etc.) signal various types of relations between clauses such as temporal, contrast, concession and cause. They are often ambiguous and therefore difficult to translate from one language to another. We discuss several new and translation-oriented experiments for the disambiguation of a specific subset of discourse connectives in order to correct some of the translation errors made by current statistical machine translation systems.