NCPrompt: NSP-Based Prompt Learning and Contrastive Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Yuetong Rong, Yijun Mo


Abstract
Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is an important task to classify the discourse relation sense between argument pairs without an explicit connective. Recently, prompt learning methods have demonstrated success in IDRR. However, prior work primarily transform IDRR into a connective-cloze task based on the masked language model (MLM), which limits the predicted connective to one single token. Also, they fail to fully exploit critical semantic features shared among various forms of templates. In this paper, we propose NCPrompt, an NSP-based prompt learning and Contrastive learning method for IDRR. Specifically, we transform the IDRR task into a next sentence prediction (NSP) task, which can allow various-length answer connectives and enlarge the construction of the verbalizer for prompt-learning methods. Also, we notice that various prompt templates naturally constitute positive samples applied for self-supervised contrastive learning. And the usage of NSP naturally creates hard negative samples by introducing different candidate connectives between the same example. To our knowledge, we are the first to combine self-supervised contrastive learning with prompt learning to obtain high-quality semantic representations. Experiments on the PDTB 3.0 corpus have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of our model.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.63
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1159–1169
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.63
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yuetong Rong and Yijun Mo. 2024. NCPrompt: NSP-Based Prompt Learning and Contrastive Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 1159–1169, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NCPrompt: NSP-Based Prompt Learning and Contrastive Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (Rong & Mo, Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.63.pdf