Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation

Yizhong Wang, Sujian Li, Jingfeng Yang


Abstract
Discourse segmentation, which segments texts into Elementary Discourse Units, is a fundamental step in discourse analysis. Previous discourse segmenters rely on complicated hand-crafted features and are not practical in actual use. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural segmenter based on BiLSTM-CRF framework. To improve its accuracy, we address the problem of data insufficiency by transferring a word representation model that is trained on a large corpus. We also propose a restricted self-attention mechanism in order to capture useful information within a neighborhood. Experiments on the RST-DT corpus show that our model is significantly faster than previous methods, while achieving new state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
D18-1116
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
962–967
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1116
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1116
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yizhong Wang, Sujian Li, and Jingfeng Yang. 2018. Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 962–967, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation (Wang et al., EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1116.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1116.mp4