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Learning Connective-based Word Representations for Implicit Discourse Relation Identification

Summary

Implicit discourse relations lack an overt connective such as but, so they are much harder to classify than explicit ones. Braud and Denis ask whether word representations designed for this rhetorical task can beat generic embeddings. They use a large amount of automatically detected explicit connectives and their arguments. From this they build a simple distributional vector space in which each word is described by how often it co-occurs with each connective. The counts are reweighted with TF-IDF or PPMI-IDF. The vectors of the two discourse segments are combined either by concatenation or by a Kronecker product and passed to a classifier trained only on implicit examples from the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB). In multiclass level-1 experiments, these representations (called Bllip) match or outperform Brown clusters and off-the-shelf embeddings. They also reach state-of-the-art macro-F1 without hand-crafted features. The method is cheap to train, needs no lexical databases and should transfer to resource-poor languages wherever connectives can be reliably detected in raw text.

Key points

  • The best configuration, Bllip PPMI-IDF with concatenation, reaches a macro-F1 of 42.2. Adding traditional features raises it to 42.8.
  • For comparison:
    • Rutherford & Xue (2015) report a macro-F1 of 40.5 but a higher accuracy (57.1 vs. 52.5).
    • The best pre-trained embedding scores 41.6.
    • One-hot tokens score 39.0 to 40.2.
  • The best Bllip vectors keep all 96 dimensions, one per connective found in the raw data, with no dimensionality reduction. Concatenation generally beat the Kronecker product.
  • Hand-crafted features add little overall, but they substantially help the Comparison relation. The connective vectors alone give the best results for Temporal and Contingency.
  • Explicit data are used only to build the representations, not to train the classifier. This avoids distribution-mismatch and sample-selection problems and shortens training time. The resources are released at bitbucket.org/chloebt/discourse-data.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

20 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 7 of them have a page here, 13 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/d16-1020

@inproceedings{braud2016learning,
  title = {{Learning Connective-based Word Representations for Implicit Discourse Relation Identification}},
  author = {Braud, Chloé and Denis, Pascal},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d16-1020},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d16-1020}
}

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