Multimodal Extraction and Recognition of Arabic Implicit Discourse Relations

Ahmed Ruby, Christian Hardmeier, Sara Stymne


Abstract
Most research on implicit discourse relation identification has focused on written language, however, it is also crucial to understand these relations in spoken discourse. We introduce a novel method for implicit discourse relation identification across both text and speech, that allows us to extract examples of semantically equivalent pairs of implicit and explicit discourse markers, based on aligning speech+transcripts with subtitles in another language variant. We apply our method to Egyptian Arabic, resulting in a novel high-quality dataset of spoken implicit discourse relations. We present a comprehensive approach to modeling implicit discourse relation classification using audio and text data with a range of different models. We find that text-based models outperform audio-based models, but combining text and audio features can lead to enhanced performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.363
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5415–5429
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.363/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmed Ruby, Christian Hardmeier, and Sara Stymne. 2025. Multimodal Extraction and Recognition of Arabic Implicit Discourse Relations. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5415–5429, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Extraction and Recognition of Arabic Implicit Discourse Relations (Ruby et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.363.pdf