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Constrained Decoding for Text-Level Discourse Parsing

Summary

The paper addresses discourse parsing for whole documents rather than single sentences. Earlier full-text parsers built structures greedily from independent local decisions. The authors train local classifiers on pairs of discourse units: one predicts whether two units are attached, and another predicts the coherence relation between them. They then decode a globally optimal structure from these scores. Discourse structures are represented as dependency-style graphs, which abstract over frameworks such as SDRT and RST. Decoding uses A* search, which can enforce linguistic constraints like the Right Frontier Constraint, and is compared with Maximum Spanning Tree (MST) and greedy decoding. Attachment and labeling are tried both jointly and as a pipeline. Experiments use the French Annodis corpus, making this the first discourse parser for French. Despite far less training data than English systems, it reaches 66.2 F1 on unlabeled and 46.8 F1 on labeled structures. These scores are comparable to prior work and show that constrained global decoding is a practical alternative to greedy parsing.

Key points

  • Data: Annodis corpus (French, SDRT-based). Training contains about 2.5k positive attachments out of 13k pairs with pruning, and about 2.7k out of 125k without pruning.
  • Results: unlabeled F1 is 66.2. Labeled F1 is 46.8 with 4 coarse relations and 36.1 with 18 relations. MST and A* decoding performed best.
  • For labeled structures, pipelining relation labeling after attachment beat joint decoding. Pruning the attachment space to a window of 5 units gave no accuracy gain.
  • Comparison with related work: Hernault et al. (2010) report 68.4 F1 on RST structure, and Feng and Hirst (2012) report 69.84 F1 on attachment. Baldridge and Lascarides (2005) report 68/43 on Verbmobil dialogues. The proposed system lands in a similar range with fewer features and much less data.
  • Planned future work includes better relation models, handling intra-sentential links separately, adapting the approach to RST corpora, integrating decoding into learning, and k-best parsing.

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

40 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 12 of them have a page here, 28 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{muller2012constrained,
  title = {{Constrained Decoding for Text-Level Discourse Parsing}},
  author = {Muller, Philippe and Afantenos, Stergos and Denis, Pascal and Asher, Nicholas},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2012},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C12-1115/}
}

References

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