Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning

Nelson Filipe Costa, Leila Kosseim


Abstract
This paper introduces the first multi-lingual and multi-label classification model for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR). Our model, HArch, is evaluated on the recently released DiscoGeM 2.0 corpus and leverages hierarchical dependencies between discourse senses to predict probability distributions across all three sense levels in the PDTB 3.0 framework. We compare several pre-trained encoder backbones and find that RoBERTa-HArch achieves the best performance in English, while XLM-RoBERTa-HArch performs best in the multi-lingual setting. In addition, we compare our fine-tuned models against GPT-4o and Llama-4-Maverick using few-shot prompting across all language configurations. Our results show that our fine-tuned models consistently outperform these LLMs, highlighting the advantages of task-specific fine-tuning over prompting in IDRR. Finally, we report SOTA results on the DiscoGeM 1.0 corpus, further validating the effectiveness of our hierarchical approach.
Anthology ID:
2025.sigdial-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Avignon, France
Editors:
Frédéric Béchet, Fabrice Lefèvre, Nicholas Asher, Seokhwan Kim, Teva Merlin
Venue:
SIGDIAL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
48–61
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.sigdial-1.4/
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Cite (ACL):
Nelson Filipe Costa and Leila Kosseim. 2025. Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 48–61, Avignon, France. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning (Costa & Kosseim, SIGDIAL 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.sigdial-1.4.pdf