Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) remains a challenging task due to the requirement for deep semantic understanding in the absence of explicit discourse markers. A further limitation is that existing methods only predict relations without providing any supporting explanations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in both deep language understanding and natural language explanation generation. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach to distill the reasoning capabilities of LLMs into lightweight IDRR models to improve both performance and interpretability. Specifically, we first prompt an LLM to generate explanations for each training instance conditioned on its gold label. Then, we introduce a novel classification-generation framework that jointly performs relation prediction and explanation generation, and train it with the additional supervision of LLM-generated explanations. Our framework is plug-and-play, enabling easy integration with most existing IDRR models. Experimental results on PDTB demonstrate that our approach significantly improves IDRR performance, while human evaluation further confirms that the generated explanations enhance model interpretability. Furthermore, we validate the generality of our approach on sentiment classification and natural language inference
Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning
Computational Linguistics at Concordia (CLaC) Laboratory（康科迪亚大学计算语言学实验室）；Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering（计算机科学与软件工程系）；Concordia University（康科迪亚大学）
From Persona to Person: Enhancing the Naturalness with Multiple Discourse Relations Graph Learning in Personalized Dialogue Generation
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan（信息工程系，国立云林科技大学，台湾）；Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan（计算机科学系，国立清华大学，台湾）
We argue that semantic meanings of a sentence or clause can not be interpreted independently from the rest of a paragraph, or independently from all discourse relations and the overall paragraph-level discourse structure. With the goal of improving implicit discourse relation classification, we introduce a paragraph-level neural networks that model inter-dependencies between discourse units as well as discourse relation continuity and patterns, and predict a sequence of discourse relations in a paragraph. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art system…
The PDTB-3 contains many more Implicit discourse relations than the previous PDTB-2. This is in part because implicit relations have now been annotated within sentences as well as between them. In addition, some now co-occur with explicit discourse relations, instead of standing on their own. Here we show that while this can complicate the problem of identifying the location of implicit discourse relations, it can in turn simplify the problem of identifying their senses. We present data to support this claim, as well as methods that can serve as a non-trivial baseline for future state-of-the-a…
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by introducing a novel set of features on the level of semantic roles. My results demonstrate that such features are helpful, yielding results competitive with other feature-rich approaches on the PDTB. My main contribution is an analysis of improvements that can be traced back to role-based features, providing insights into why and when role semantics is helpful.
Dept. of Language Science and Technology（语言科学与技术系）；Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most difficult steps in discourse parsing. The difficulty stems from the fact that the coherence relation must be inferred based on the content of the discourse relational arguments. Therefore, an effective encoding of the relational arguments is of crucial importance. We here propose a new model for implicit discourse relation classification, which consists of a classifier, and a sequence-to-sequence model which is trained to generate a representation of the discourse relational arguments by trying to predict the relational arguments in…
Discourse Features Enhance Detection of Document-Level Machine-Generated Content
Department of Computing Imperial College London London, UK；Chair of Health Informatics Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany；5cm Department of Computing \& Chair of Health Informatics 5cm Imperial College London \& Technical University of Munich 5cm London, UK \& Munich, Germany 5cm
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation（语言、认知与计算研究所）；School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）
In the PDTB-3, several thousand implicit discourse relations were newly annotated \textit{within} individual sentences, adding to the over 15,000 implicit relations annotated \textit{across} adjacent sentences in the PDTB-2. Given that the position of the arguments to these \textit{intra-sentential implicits} is no longer as well-defined as with \textit{inter-sentential implicits}, a discourse parser must identify both their location and their sense. That is the focus of the current work. The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of our results, showcasing model performance under different s…
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connective as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of training data (ca.~16k instances in the PDTB). Shi et al. (2017) proposed to acquire additional data by exploiting connectives in translation: human translators mark discourse relations which are implicit in the source language explicitly in the translation. Using back-translations of such explicitated connectives improves discourse relation parsing performanc…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Transsion Co., Ltd.（上海传音控股股份有限公司）
Due to the absence of connectives, implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) is still a challenging and crucial task in discourse analysis. Most of the current work adopted multi-task learning to aid IDRR through explicit discourse relation recognition (EDRR) or utilized dependencies between discourse relation labels to constrain model predictions. But these methods still performed poorly on fine-grained IDRR and even utterly misidentified on most of the few-shot discourse relation classes. To address these problems, we propose a novel Prompt-based Connective Prediction (PCP) method for I…
In implicit discourse relation classification, we want to predict the relation between adjacent sentences in the absence of any overt discourse connectives. This is challenging even for humans, leading to shortage of annotated data, a fact that makes the task even more difficult for supervised machine learning approaches. In the current study, we perform implicit discourse relation classification without relying on any labeled implicit relation. We sidestep the lack of data through explicitation of implicit relations to reduce the task to two sub-problems: language modeling and explicit discou…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）
Implicit discourse relation classification is of great importance for discourse parsing, but remains a challenging problem due to the absence of explicit discourse connectives communicating these relations. Modeling the semantic interactions between the two arguments of a relation has proven useful for detecting implicit discourse relations. However, most previous approaches model such semantic interactions from a shallow interactive level, which is inadequate on capturing enough semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Semantic Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN) t…
Automatically classifying the relation between sentences in a discourse is a challenging task, in particular when there is no overt expression of the relation. It becomes even more challenging by the fact that annotated training data exists only for a small number of languages, such as English and Chinese. We present a new system using zero-shot transfer learning for implicit discourse relation classification, where the only resource used for the target language is unannotated parallel text. This system is evaluated on the discourse-annotated TED-MDB parallel corpus, where it obtains good resu…
Implicit discourse relations are not only more challenging to classify, but also to annotate, than their explicit counterparts. We tackle situations where training data for implicit relations are lacking, and exploit domain adaptation from explicit relations (Ji et al., 2015). We present an unsupervised adversarial domain adaptive network equipped with a reconstruction component. Our system outperforms prior works and other adversarial benchmarks for unsupervised domain adaptation. Additionally, we extend our system to take advantage of labeled data if some are available.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most difficult parts in shallow discourse parsing as the relation prediction without explicit connectives requires the language understanding at both the text span level and the sentence level. Previous studies mainly focus on the interactions between two arguments. We argue that a powerful contextualized representation module, a bilateral multi-perspective matching module, and a global information fusion module are all important to implicit discourse analysis. We propose a novel model to combine these modules together. Extensive experim…
Yelp（Yelp公司）；University of Saarland（萨尔大学）；Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）
Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Surface features achieve good performance, but they are not readily applicable to other languages without semantic lexicons. Previous neural models require parses, surface features, or a small label set to work well. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture without any surface features. To our surprise, our best configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Discourse relation identification has been an active area of research for many years, and the challenge of identifying implicit relations remains largely an unsolved task, especially in the context of an open-domain dialogue system. Previous work primarily relies on a corpora of formal text which is inherently non-dialogic, i.e., news and journals. This data however is not suitable to handle the nuances of informal dialogue nor is it capable of navigating the plethora of valid topics present in open-domain dialogue. In this paper, we designed a novel discourse relation identification pipeline …
Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer（埃普塔尔斯特圣经与计算机研究中心）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；Department of Mathematics（数学系）；Department of Marketing, School of Business and Economics（市场营销系，商学院与经济学院）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
A discourse containing one or more sentences describes daily issues and events for people to communicate their thoughts and opinions. As sentences are normally consist of multiple text segments, correct understanding of the theme of a discourse should take into consideration of the relations in between text segments. Although sometimes a connective exists in raw texts for conveying relations, it is more often the cases that no connective exists in between two text segments but some implicit relation does exist in between them. The task of implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) is to de…
Enthymemes are defined as arguments where a premise or conclusion is left implicit. We tackle the task of generating the implicit premise in an enthymeme, which requires not only an understanding of the stated conclusion and premise but also additional inferences that could depend on commonsense knowledge. The largest available dataset for enthymemes (Habernal et al., 2018) consists of 1.7k samples, which is not large enough to train a neural text generation model. To address this issue, we take advantage of a similar task and dataset: Abductive reasoning in narrative text (Bhagavatula et al.,…
We describe Turkish Discourse Bank 1.2, the latest version of a discourse corpus annotated for explicitly or implicitly conveyed discourse relations, their constitutive units, and senses in the Penn Discourse Treebank style. We present an evaluation of the recently added tokens and examine three commonly occurring dependency patterns that hold among the constitutive units of a pair of adjacent discourse relations, namely, shared arguments, full embedding and partial containment of a discourse relation. We present three major findings: (a) implicitly conveyed relations occur more often than exp…
A Multi-Task and Multi-Label Classification Model for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Computational Linguistics at Concordia (CLaC) Laboratory（康科迪亚大学计算语言学实验室）；Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering（计算机科学与软件工程系）；Concordia University（康科迪亚大学）
Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University, MOE, China（北京大学计算语言学重点实验室（教育部））；Collaborative Innovation Center for Language Ability, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China（语言能力协同创新中心（江苏徐州））；Peking University（北京大学）
Identifying implicit discourse relations between text spans is a challenging task because it requires understanding the meaning of the text. To tackle this task, recent studies have tried several deep learning methods but few of them exploited the syntactic information. In this work, we explore the idea of incorporating syntactic parse tree into neural networks. Specifically, we employ the Tree-LSTM model and Tree-GRU model, which are based on the tree structure, to encode the arguments in a relation. Moreover, we further leverage the constituent tags to control the semantic composition proces…
Global and Local Hierarchy-aware Contrastive Framework for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Peking University（北京大学）；Collaborative Innovation Center for Language Ability（语言能力协同创新中心）
Without discourse connectives, classifying implicit discourse relations is a challenging task and a bottleneck for building a practical discourse parser. Previous research usually makes use of one kind of discourse framework such as PDTB or RST to improve the classification performance on discourse relations. Actually, under different discourse annotation frameworks, there exist multiple corpora which have internal connections. To exploit the combination of different discourse corpora, we design related discourse classification tasks specific to a corpus, and propose a novel Convolutional Neur…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Implicit discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. Automatic sense prediction for implicit relations is hard, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. Furthermore, annotated datasets contain relatively few labeled examples, due to the scale of the phenomenon: on average each discourse relation encompasses several dozen words. In this paper, we explore the utility of pre-trained sentence embeddings as base representations in a neural network for implicit discourse relation sense classification. We present a series of experiments using…
From Context to EDUs: Faithful and Structured Context Compression via Elementary Discourse Unit Decomposition
DeepLang AI；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（计算机科学与技术系，清华大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
When humans read or listen, they make implicit commonsense inferences that frame their understanding of what happened and why. As a step toward AI systems that can build similar mental models, we introduce GLUCOSE, a large-scale dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, encoded as causal mini-theories about the world, each grounded in a narrative context. To construct GLUCOSE, we drew on cognitive psychology to identify ten dimensions of causal explanation, focusing on events, states, motivations, and emotions. Each GLUCOSE entry includes a story-specific causal statement paired with a…
