Split or Merge: Which is Better for Unsupervised RST Parsing?

Naoki Kobayashi, Tsutomu Hirao, Kengo Nakamura, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, Masaaki Nagata

Abstract
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing is crucial for many downstream NLP tasks that require a discourse structure for a text. Most of the previous RST parsers have been based on supervised learning approaches. That is, they require an annotated corpus of sufficient size and quality, and heavily rely on the language and domain dependent corpus. In this paper, we present two language-independent unsupervised RST parsing methods based on dynamic programming. The first one builds the optimal tree in terms of a dissimilarity score function that is defined for splitting a text span into smaller ones. The second builds the optimal tree in terms of a similarity score function that is defined for merging two adjacent spans into a large one. Experimental results on English and German RST treebanks showed that our parser based on span merging achieved the best score, around 0.8 F1 score, which is close to the scores of the previous supervised parsers.
Anthology ID:
D19-1587
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:
5797–5802
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1587
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1587
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naoki Kobayashi, Tsutomu Hirao, Kengo Nakamura, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, and Masaaki Nagata. 2019. Split or Merge: Which is Better for Unsupervised RST Parsing?. 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 5797–5802, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Split or Merge: Which is Better for Unsupervised RST Parsing? (Kobayashi et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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