Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data

Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk, Patricia Martin-Rodilla, Javier Parapar


Abstract
We explore the use of discourse parsers for extracting a particular discourse structure in a real-world social media scenario. Specifically, we focus on enhancing parser performance through the integration of synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs). We conduct experiments using a newly developed dataset of 1,170 local RST discourse structures, including 900 synthetic and 270 gold examples, covering three social media platforms: online news comments sections, a discussion forum (Reddit), and a social media messaging platform (Twitter). Our primary goal is to assess the impact of LLM-generated synthetic training data on parser performance in a raw text setting without pre-identified discourse units. While both top-down and bottom-up RST architectures greatly benefit from synthetic data, challenges remain in classifying evaluative discourse structures.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.584
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:
8739–8748
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.584/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk, Patricia Martin-Rodilla, and Javier Parapar. 2025. Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8739–8748, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data (Pastor et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.584.pdf