Xichen Shang


2021

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A Span-based Dynamic Local Attention Model for Sequential Sentence Classification
Xichen Shang | Qianli Ma | Zhenxi Lin | Jiangyue Yan | Zipeng Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Sequential sentence classification aims to classify each sentence in the document based on the context in which sentences appear. Most existing work addresses this problem using a hierarchical sequence labeling network. However, they ignore considering the latent segment structure of the document, in which contiguous sentences often have coherent semantics. In this paper, we proposed a span-based dynamic local attention model that could explicitly capture the structural information by the proposed supervised dynamic local attention. We further introduce an auxiliary task called span-based classification to explore the span-level representations. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves better or competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmark datasets.