Exploiting Scope for Shallow Discourse Parsing

Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Webber


Abstract
We present an approach to automatically identifying the arguments of discourse connectives based on data from the Penn Discourse Treebank. Of the two arguments of connectives, called Arg1 and Arg2, we focus on Arg1, which has proven more challenging to identify. Our approach employs a sentence-based representation of arguments, and distinguishes ""intra-sentential connectives"", which take both their arguments in the same sentence, from ""inter-sentential connectives"", whose arguments are found in different sentences. The latter are further distinguished by paragraph position into ""ParaInit"" connectives, which appear in a paragraph-initial sentence, and ""ParaNonInit"" connectives, which appear elsewhere. The paper focusses on predicting Arg1 of Inter-sentential ParaNonInit connectives, presenting a set of scope-based filters that reduce the search space for Arg1 from all the previous sentences in the paragraph to a subset of them. For cases where these filters do not uniquely identify Arg1, coreference-based heuristics are employed. Our analysis shows an absolute 3% performance improvement over the high baseline of 83.3% for identifying Arg1 of Inter-sentential ParaNonInit connectives.
Anthology ID:
L10-1634
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/935_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2010. Exploiting Scope for Shallow Discourse Parsing. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Exploiting Scope for Shallow Discourse Parsing (Prasad et al., LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/935_Paper.pdf