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Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition by Selecting Typical Training Examples

Summary

Recognizing implicit discourse relations (sentence pairs linked without an explicit connective) is difficult, and earlier systems trained on one of two sources. Some used manually annotated implicit relations. Others used "artificial" implicit examples, made by deleting connectives from explicit relations. Wang et al. argue that the better question is whether an example is typical, meaning its arguments carry clear cues for the relation, rather than whether it is real or artificial. They propose single centroid clustering (SCC), a bootstrapping-style procedure inspired by Yarowsky's algorithm. Starting from seed examples, it grows a set of typical examples for each relation, drawing on both natively implicit and connective-stripped explicit data. Classifiers trained only on this typical subset (Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree, without dedicated feature selection) perform comparably to strong prior systems on PDTB v2.0. They also beat training on all real, all artificial, or combined data. A portability test on RST-DT shows statistically significant gains. The work matters because it shows that curating training data can improve performance as much as feature engineering does.

Key points

  • Data: Experiments use the top-level PDTB v2.0 classes (Comparison, Contingency, Temporal, Expansion), set up as one-vs-other and 4-way tasks.
  • Main PDTB result: With the Decision Tree, SCC-selected training data raises Comparison-vs-Other F1 to 28.5, compared with 11.6 when training on real implicit examples alone. The reported 4-way accuracy is about 72.2.
  • Composition of the typical set: It contains roughly equal shares of implicit and explicit-derived examples. About 61.8% of the data was judged typical. Most misclassified test items are atypical.
  • Portability (RST-DT): The data was split into 347 training and 38 test articles, using Contrast, Background, Cause and Temporal. Cause-vs-Other F1 improved from 35.6 (IM baseline) to 54.8. Paired t-test p-values were about 0.057–0.059.
  • Future directions named by the authors: richer features, finer-grained relations, alternative distance measures in SCC, and use of unlabelled 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

16 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 12 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{wang2012implicit,
  title = {{Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition by Selecting Typical Training Examples}},
  author = {Wang, Xun and Li, Sujian and Li, Jiwei and Li, Wenjie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2012},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C12-1168/}
}

References

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