Annotation-Inspired Implicit Discourse Relation Classification with Auxiliary Discourse Connective Generation

Wei Liu, Michael Strube


Abstract
Implicit discourse relation classification is a challenging task due to the absence of discourse connectives. To overcome this issue, we design an end-to-end neural model to explicitly generate discourse connectives for the task, inspired by the annotation process of PDTB. Specifically, our model jointly learns to generate discourse connectives between arguments and predict discourse relations based on the arguments and the generated connectives. To prevent our relation classifier from being misled by poor connectives generated at the early stage of training while alleviating the discrepancy between training and inference, we adopt Scheduled Sampling to the joint learning. We evaluate our method on three benchmarks, PDTB 2.0, PDTB 3.0, and PCC. Results show that our joint model significantly outperforms various baselines on three datasets, demonstrating its superiority for the task.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.874
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:
15696–15712
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.874
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.874
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Liu and Michael Strube. 2023. Annotation-Inspired Implicit Discourse Relation Classification with Auxiliary Discourse Connective Generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15696–15712, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Annotation-Inspired Implicit Discourse Relation Classification with Auxiliary Discourse Connective Generation (Liu & Strube, ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.874.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.874.mp4