Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives

Farnoush Nili, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh, Eduard Dragut


Abstract
Health discourse in social media videos often contains densely entangled claims spanning multiple thematic aspects, stances, evidential frames, and rhetorical functions within short conversational spans. Existing approaches largely rely on coarse topic-level, sentiment-based, or stance-oriented representations that do not adequately capture this structure. Our analysis identifies an average of 13.22 atomic claims per minute, motivating richer claim-level discourse representations. We introduce a structured framework for claim-level discourse analysis in dense health narratives. Our framework models discourse through tuples linking atomic claims with thematic aspects, stance, and multidimensional pragmatic discourse attributes. To support this setting, we construct a benchmark spanning four health domains with 1,191 manually annotated claims from 60 videos. Using this framework, we evaluate automated structured discourse analysis under different discourse context settings. Results show that current LLMs achieve strong performance on thematic categorization and stance prediction, but struggle with high-dimensional pragmatic profiling. We also find that different discourse tasks benefit from different forms of contextual reasoning, suggesting that future systems may require task decomposition and specialized inference strategies.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1557
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
35503–35523
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1557/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Farnoush Nili, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh, and Eduard Dragut. 2026. Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 35503–35523, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives (Nili et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1557.pdf