In the LADTB, we use the same definition of the discourse connectives as in the PDTB (Miltsakaki, Prasad et al. 2006) for Arabic as other languages which their discourse connectives were annotated, in that discourse connectives are defined as:

” lexical expressions that relate two text segments expressing abstract objectssuch as events, beliefs, facts or propositions. The text segments are called arguments (Arg1 and Arg2) of a specific connective. This connective should indicate one or more discourse relations such as Elaboration, Exemplification, Contrast, Temporal, Exception, Causal or simply Conjunction”

Example:

أحمد لم يذهب الى الحفلةلأنه كان متعبا.على النقيض لقد خلد الى النوم.

[sleep to went contrast in. tired was he-because party to go did-not Ahmad]

 Ahmad didn’t go to the party, because he was tired. Instead, he went to bed.

In the example the connective لان/lAn/because in the second clause establishes explicitly that the reason for Ahmad being absent from the party is that he was tired (Causal relation), whereas the connective على النقيض/ElA Alnqyz/instead in the third clause contrasts going to bed with going to the party (Contrast relation). The connective لان/lAn/because,therefore, takes clause 1 and clause 2 as its arguments. However, the second connective على النقيض/ElA Alnqyz/instead takes clause 1 and clause 3 as its arguments. It can be seen that there is no need for arguments to be adjacent, and they may differ in length and structure.

​We have collected in the LADTB project a large scale list of discourse connectives available for contemporary Arabic. The discourse connectives collection process resulted in a list containing 91 basic Arabic discourse connectives, enhanced with 16 modified forms such as رغم ان/rgm An/although is a modified form of رغم/rgm/although, yielding 107 discourse connectives overall. A sample of our Arabic discourse connective list is shown in the table ‎below. 

For the full list of our Arabic Discourse Connective see publications​ page, or contact the developers.

Table conventions:

• The connective has Buckwalter form and one common used English translation, there might be more than one possible translation of the connective.
• The connective type: it might be (Simple: a white-space token, MoreThanToken: a complete syntactic phrase or just more than one token, and Clitic: part of a token attached to different word).
• The position of the connective in the sentence as appeared in the ATB: BOS stands to Begining of the sentence, MOS stands to Middle of the sentence, and EOS stands to End of the sentence. A connective might have more than one possible position.  
• The Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags in the last column are according to version 2 of the ATB, they might be modified slightly in the new version of the ATB.
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