@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-beyond-chunking,
title = "Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering",
author = "Chen, Huiyao and
Yang, Yi and
Li, Yinghui and
Zhang, Meishan and
Hu, Baotian and
Zhang, Min",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.829/",
pages = "18176--18198",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Existing long-document question answering systems typically process texts as flat sequences or use heuristic chunking, which overlook the discourse structures that naturally guide human comprehension. We present a discourse-aware hierarchical framework that leverages rhetorical structure theory (RST) for long document question answering. Our approach converts discourse trees into sentence-level representations and employs LLM-enhanced node representations to bridge structural and semantic information. The framework involves three key innovations: language-universal discourse parsing for lengthy documents, LLM-based enhancement of discourse relation nodes, and structure-guided hierarchical retrieval. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing approaches through the incorporation of discourse structure, across multiple genres and languages. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits strong robustness across diverse document types and linguistic settings."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="chen-etal-2026-beyond-chunking">
<titleInfo>
<title>Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Huiyao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yinghui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Meishan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Baotian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Min</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Existing long-document question answering systems typically process texts as flat sequences or use heuristic chunking, which overlook the discourse structures that naturally guide human comprehension. We present a discourse-aware hierarchical framework that leverages rhetorical structure theory (RST) for long document question answering. Our approach converts discourse trees into sentence-level representations and employs LLM-enhanced node representations to bridge structural and semantic information. The framework involves three key innovations: language-universal discourse parsing for lengthy documents, LLM-based enhancement of discourse relation nodes, and structure-guided hierarchical retrieval. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing approaches through the incorporation of discourse structure, across multiple genres and languages. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits strong robustness across diverse document types and linguistic settings.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">chen-etal-2026-beyond-chunking</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.829/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>18176</start>
<end>18198</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering
%A Chen, Huiyao
%A Yang, Yi
%A Li, Yinghui
%A Zhang, Meishan
%A Hu, Baotian
%A Zhang, Min
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F chen-etal-2026-beyond-chunking
%X Existing long-document question answering systems typically process texts as flat sequences or use heuristic chunking, which overlook the discourse structures that naturally guide human comprehension. We present a discourse-aware hierarchical framework that leverages rhetorical structure theory (RST) for long document question answering. Our approach converts discourse trees into sentence-level representations and employs LLM-enhanced node representations to bridge structural and semantic information. The framework involves three key innovations: language-universal discourse parsing for lengthy documents, LLM-based enhancement of discourse relation nodes, and structure-guided hierarchical retrieval. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing approaches through the incorporation of discourse structure, across multiple genres and languages. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits strong robustness across diverse document types and linguistic settings.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.829/
%P 18176-18198
Markdown (Informal)
[Beyond Chunking: Discourse-Aware Hierarchical Retrieval for Long Document Question Answering](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.829/) (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
ACL