The capabilities and use cases of automatic natural language processing (NLP)
have grown significantly over the last few years. While much work has been
devoted to understanding how humans deal with discourse connectives, this
phenomenon is understudied in computational systems. Therefore, it is important
to put NLP models under the microscope and examine whether they can adequately
comprehend, process, and reason within the complexity of natural language. In
this chapter, we introduce the main mechanisms behind automatic sentence
processing systems step by step and then focus on evaluating discourse
connective processing. We assess nine popular systems in their ability to
understand English discourse connectives and analyze how context and language
understanding tasks affect their connective comprehension. The results show
that NLP systems do not process all discourse connectives equally well and that
the computational processing complexity of different connective kinds is not
always consistently in line with the presumed complexity order found in human
processing. In addition, while humans are more inclined to be influenced during
the reading procedure but not necessarily in the final comprehension
performance, discourse connectives have a significant impact on the final
accuracy of NLP systems. The richer knowledge of connectives a system learns,
the more negative effect inappropriate connectives have on it. This suggests
that the correct explicitation of discourse connectives is important for
computational natural language processing.

机器自然语言处理系统对话连词的理解和处理能力的评估表明，不同类型的连词在计算处理复杂性上并不总是与人类处理中的预期顺序一致，并且系统对连词的准确理解对最终的 NLP 系统性能有重要影响。