Chinese discourse parsing, which aims to identify the hierarchical relationships of Chinese elementary discourse units, has not yet a consistent evaluation metric. Although Parseval is commonly used, variations of evaluation differ from three aspects: micro vs. macro F1 scores, binary vs. multiway ground truth, and left-heavy vs. right-heavy binarization. In this paper, we first propose a neural network model that unifies a pre-trained transformer and CKY-like algorithm, and then compare it with the previous models with different evaluation scenarios. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous systems. We conclude that (1) the pre-trained context embedding provides effective solutions to deal with implicit semantics in Chinese texts, and (2) using multiway ground truth is helpful since different binarization approaches lead to significant differences in performance.

This paper demonstrates an end-to-end Chinese discourse parser. We propose a unified framework based on recursive neural network (RvNN) to jointly model the subtasks including elementary discourse unit (EDU) segmentation, tree structure construction, center labeling, and sense labeling. Experimental results show our parser achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) dataset. We release the source code with a pre-trained model for the NLP community. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first open source toolkit for Chinese discourse parsing. The standalone toolkit can be integrated into subsequent applications without the need of external resources such as syntactic parser.