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<Paper uid="P98-2202">
  <Title>DiMLex: A lexicon of discourse markers for text generation and understanding</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="1241" end_page="1241" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Summary and Outlook
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Discourse markers, words that signal the presence of a coherence relation between adjacent text spans, play important roles in human text understanding and production. Due to their being classified as &amp;quot;non-content words&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;function words&amp;quot;, however, they have not received sufficient attention in natural language processing yet. In response to this situation, we are assembling pieces of information on German and English discourse markers from grammars, dictionaries, and the linguistics research literature.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This information is classified and organized into a discourse marker lexicon, DiMLex.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The first phase of our project runs until mid1999. At present, we are on the theoretical side focusing our attention on German CONTRAST and CONCESSION markers; on the implementational side, we have assembled a generation testbed that allows for exploring the role of DiMLex in producing paragraph-size text. By the end of the first phase, we plan to have completed a system that produces German and English text, with a prototypical DiMLex specified for contrastive markers. For a potential follow-up phase of the project, we envisage enlarging DiMLex to other groups of markers; working out systematic lexical representations within a suitable formalism; and giving more attention to the requirements for text understanding in addition to those of generation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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