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DiscoExplorer: An Open Interface for the Study of Multilingual Discourse Relations

The relations connecting propositions in discourse such as cause (A because B) or concession (A although B) are a subject of intense interest in Computational Linguistics and Pragmatics, but challenging to study and compare across languages. Recent progress in standardizing discourse relation inventories across datasets offers the potential to facilitate such studies, but is hindered by the complexity of relevant data and the lack of easily accessible interfaces to analyze it. In this paper we present DiscoExplorer, a new open source web interface, capable of running on local computers, which we use to make datasets from the DISRPT Shared Task on discourse relation classification publicly available, covering 16 different languages. We present the query language, search and visualization facilities for relations and signaling devices such as connectives, as well as some example studies.