Weak Supervision for Learning Discourse Structure

Sonia Badene, Kate Thompson, Jean-Pierre Lorré, Nicholas Asher

Abstract
This paper provides a detailed comparison of a data programming approach with (i) off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art deep learning architectures that optimize their representations (BERT) and (ii) handcrafted-feature approaches previously used in the discourse analysis literature. We compare these approaches on the task of learning discourse structure for multi-party dialogue. The data programming paradigm offered by the Snorkel framework allows a user to label training data using expert-composed heuristics, which are then transformed via the “generative step” into probability distributions of the class labels given the data. We show that on our task the generative model outperforms both deep learning architectures as well as more traditional ML approaches when learning discourse structure—it even outperforms the combination of deep learning methods and hand-crafted features. We also implement several strategies for “decoding” our generative model output in order to improve our results. We conclude that weak supervision methods hold great promise as a means for creating and improving data sets for discourse structure.
Anthology ID:
D19-1234
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2296–2305
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1234
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1234
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sonia Badene, Kate Thompson, Jean-Pierre Lorré, and Nicholas Asher. 2019. Weak Supervision for Learning Discourse Structure. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2296–2305, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Weak Supervision for Learning Discourse Structure (Badene et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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