1988 Reports

But What Do You Need To Produce a But?

Elhadad, Michael; McKeown, Kathleen

We study the problem of appropriately generating connectives (e.g., 'but', 'because', 'since', 'however') in a discourse. We claim that connectives operate at the discourse level rather than the semantic level, and that they indicate pragmatic features of the units they connect. Therefore, in order to choose the appropriate connective, a surface generator must find in its input a set of pragmatic features that affect or are affected by the choice of a connective. We present such a set of features and show their role in a variety of examples of the connective 'but'.