Automatic Event Salience Identification

Zhengzhong Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Teruko Mitamura, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
Identifying the salience (i.e. importance) of discourse units is an important task in language understanding. While events play important roles in text documents, little research exists on analyzing their saliency status. This paper empirically studies Event Salience and proposes two salience detection models based on discourse relations. The first is a feature based salience model that incorporates cohesion among discourse units. The second is a neural model that captures more complex interactions between discourse units. In our new large-scale event salience corpus, both methods significantly outperform the strong frequency baseline, while our neural model further improves the feature based one by a large margin. Our analyses demonstrate that our neural model captures interesting connections between salience and discourse unit relations (e.g., scripts and frame structures).
Anthology ID:
D18-1154
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:
1226–1236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1154
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1154
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengzhong Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Teruko Mitamura, and Eduard Hovy. 2018. Automatic Event Salience Identification. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1226–1236, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Event Salience Identification (Liu et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1154.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1154.mp4
Code
 hunterhector/EventSalience
Data
FrameNetNew York Times Annotated Corpus