Distributed Marker Representation for Ambiguous Discourse Markers and Entangled Relations

Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Xipeng Qiu, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang


Abstract
Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as well as pre-defined and human-labeled discourse relations can be ambiguous when describing the semantics between sentences. We believe that a better approach is to use a contextual-dependent distribution over the markers to express discourse information. In this work, we propose to learn a Distributed Marker Representation (DMR) by utilizing the (potentially) unlimited discourse marker data with a latent discourse sense, thereby bridging markers with sentence pairs. Such representations can be learned automatically from data without supervision, and in turn provide insights into the data itself. Experiments show the SOTA performance of our DMR on the implicit discourse relation recognition task and strong interpretability. Our method also offers a valuable tool to understand complex ambiguity and entanglement among discourse markers and manually defined discourse relations.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.292
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5334–5351
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.292
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.292
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Xipeng Qiu, Yue Zhang, and Zheng Zhang. 2023. Distributed Marker Representation for Ambiguous Discourse Markers and Entangled Relations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5334–5351, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distributed Marker Representation for Ambiguous Discourse Markers and Entangled Relations (Ru et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.292.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.292.mp4