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The CoNLL-2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing

Summary

The CoNLL-2015 shared task introduced Shallow Discourse Parsing as a community benchmark. Given English news text, a system must find individual discourse relations. This involves locating any explicit connective, marking the two argument spans as Arg1 and Arg2, and assigning a sense label. Relations may be explicit (signalled by words like "because" or "however") or non-explicit (Implicit, AltLex, EntRel, NoRel). The organizers adapted the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB 2.0), built on the WSJ corpus, for training and development. For a blind test, they newly annotated Wikinews articles following PDTB guidelines. Sixteen teams took part. For the first time in CoNLL, systems were deployed on remote virtual machines and run through the TIRA web platform, so participants never saw the test data. Full end-to-end parsing proved very hard: the strongest system reached only 24.0% F1 on the blind set, largely because errors compound across pipeline stages. The released data and scorer provide a lasting benchmark for discourse parsing research.

Key points

  • Data splits: PDTB 2.0 Sections 2–21 were used for training, Section 22 for development, and Section 23 as a standard test set. Official rankings relied on a separate blind test set of 30,158 words drawn from English Wikinews.
  • PDTB 2.0 relation counts: the corpus holds 40,600 relations, broken down as follows:
    • 18,459 Explicit
    • 16,053 Implicit
    • 624 AltLex
    • 5,210 EntRel
    • 254 NoRel
  • Sense labels: senses follow a three-level hierarchy with 4 top classes and 16 second-level types. Attribution and supplementary-span annotations were left out of the task.
  • Evaluation setup: 16 teams from three continents submitted systems through the TIRA platform. This kept the test data hidden and the evaluation reproducible.
  • Results: the best end-to-end score on the blind test was 24.0% F1. Non-Explicit relations were much harder to handle than Explicit ones, and some teams tackled only the Explicit subtask.

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

82 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 37 of them have a page here, 45 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/k15-2001

@inproceedings{xue2015conll,
  title = {{The CoNLL-2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing}},
  author = {Xue, Nianwen and Ng, Hwee Tou and Pradhan, Sameer and Prasad, Rashmi and Bryant, Christopher and Rutherford, Attapol},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning - Shared Task},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/k15-2001},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/k15-2001}
}

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