During his stay, Dr Versley aims to explore methods of discovering discourse structuring devices (e.g. connectives) in languages currently lacking a dictionary, using annotation projection techniques as well as recently developed syntactic corpora with a language-universal annotation scheme. Building on his previous work (Versley 2010) as well as improvements by others (Laali and Kosseim 2014), Dr Versley will work together with Prof. Tiedemann and others in Uppsala to explore connections both between phrasal syntax and the grammar of connectives as well as those between languages in a parallel corpus. In particular, the following will be achieved: feature extraction from a parallel corpus based on rich linguistic preprocessing; tagging of discourse connectives; alignment of tagged discourse connectives, and discovery of alternative discourse connectives; syntax-based filtering based on universal dependencies.
