Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data
Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk, Patricia Martin-Rodilla, Javier Parapar
Abstract
We explore the use of discourse parsers for extracting a particular discourse structure in a real-world social media scenario. Specifically, we focus on enhancing parser performance through the integration of synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs). We conduct experiments using a newly developed dataset of 1,170 local RST discourse structures, including 900 synthetic and 270 gold examples, covering three social media platforms: online news comments sections, a discussion forum (Reddit), and a social media messaging platform (Twitter). Our primary goal is to assess the impact of LLM-generated synthetic training data on parser performance in a raw text setting without pre-identified discourse units. While both top-down and bottom-up RST architectures greatly benefit from synthetic data, challenges remain in classifying evaluative discourse structures.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.coling-main.584
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- January
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Editors:
- Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8739–8748
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.coling-main.584/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk, Patricia Martin-Rodilla, and Javier Parapar. 2025. Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8739–8748, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Enhancing Discourse Parsing for Local Structures from Social Media with LLM-Generated Data (Pastor et al., COLING 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.coling-main.584.pdf