Improving Neural RST Parsing Model with Silver Agreement Subtrees

Naoki Kobayashi, Tsutomu Hirao, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, Masaaki Nagata


Abstract
Most of the previous Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing methods are based on supervised learning such as neural networks, that require an annotated corpus of sufficient size and quality. However, the RST Discourse Treebank (RST-DT), the benchmark corpus for RST parsing in English, is small due to the costly annotation of RST trees. The lack of large annotated training data causes poor performance especially in relation labeling. Therefore, we propose a method for improving neural RST parsing models by exploiting silver data, i.e., automatically annotated data. We create large-scale silver data from an unlabeled corpus by using a state-of-the-art RST parser. To obtain high-quality silver data, we extract agreement subtrees from RST trees for documents built using the RST parsers. We then pre-train a neural RST parser with the obtained silver data and fine-tune it on the RST-DT. Experimental results show that our method achieved the best micro-F1 scores for Nuclearity and Relation at 75.0 and 63.2, respectively. Furthermore, we obtained a remarkable gain in the Relation score, 3.0 points, against the previous state-of-the-art parser.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.127
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1600–1612
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.127
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.127
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naoki Kobayashi, Tsutomu Hirao, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, and Masaaki Nagata. 2021. Improving Neural RST Parsing Model with Silver Agreement Subtrees. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1600–1612, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Neural RST Parsing Model with Silver Agreement Subtrees (Kobayashi et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.127.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.127.mp4
Data
RST-DT