Toward automatic determination of the semantics of connectives in large newspaper corpora

We explored the possibility of using automatic techniques to analyze the use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of 2 techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were studied. The method of analysis is described. We found that differences that have been suggested in the literature via hand-based analyses between these types of connectives (e.g., on dimensions such as subjectivity, change in perspective, and factuality of the connected segments) also appear in our corpus of 16.5 million words