Learning to Explicitate Connectives with Seq2Seq Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
Summary
Identifying implicit discourse relations, where no connective such as "because" or "but" signals the link between two text spans, is a major bottleneck in discourse parsing. Shi and Demberg tackle this with a model that copies how PDTB annotators worked: annotators first inserted a fitting connective and only then chose a relation label. The model pairs a classifier with a seq2seq network. The network reads [Arg1; Arg2] and learns to output [Arg1; implicit connective; Arg2], using the connectives annotated in PDTB 2.0. Its parts are a bidirectional LSTM encoder over Word2Vec embeddings, a separate LSTM decoder with Luong-style global attention, a gated-interaction layer, and a context memory network that retrieves similar training instances. The classifier combines the original argument encoding, the "explicitated" decoder representation, and the memory-derived knowledge vector. The authors report state-of-the-art results on the standard 11-way PDTB classification, including under cross-validation, and strong results on top-level 4-way and binary tasks. This suggests that generating a connective as an auxiliary task produces more discriminative representations of the arguments.
Key points
- Auxiliary task: reconstruct the arguments with the annotated implicit connective inserted, so the input and output sequences differ. This distinguishes the model from a plain autoencoder and from the adversarial connective approach of Qin et al. (2017).
- Data: PDTB 2.0 implicit relations, with 12,345 training, 1,156 development and 1,011 test instances at the top level. Only 55 Temporal instances appear in the test set.
- Top-level 4-way results: 61.42% accuracy (the best reported) and 46.40 macro-F1 (second best).
- One-vs-all binary F1: Comparison 41.83, Contingency 62.07, Expansion 69.58, Temporal 35.72. The model beats prior systems on Comparison and Contingency.
- Analysis and outlook: memory attention tends to select training examples with the same relation. The gains are not explained merely by a larger parameter count. The authors see potential for connective prediction and argument generation.
Cited by
- Adapting BERT to Implicit Discourse Relation Classification with a Focus on Discourse Connectives
- Design Choices for Crowdsourcing Implicit Discourse Relations: Revealing the Biases Introduced by Task Design
- DiscoGeM: A Crowdsourced Corpus of Genre-Mixed Implicit Discourse Relations
- Acquiring Annotated Data with Cross-lingual Explicitation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification
- Next Sentence Prediction helps Implicit Discourse Relation Classification within and across Domains
Cite
@inproceedings{shi2019learning,
title = {{Learning to Explicitate Connectives with Seq2Seq Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification}},
author = {Shi, Wei and Demberg, Vera},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-0416},
eprint = {1811.01697},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-0416}
}References
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