Joint Modeling of Entities and Discourse Relations for Coherence Assessment

Wei Liu, Michael Strube


Abstract
In linguistics, coherence can be achieved by different means, such as by maintaining reference to the same set of entities across sentences and by establishing discourse relations between them. However, most existing work on coherence modeling focuses exclusively on either entity features or discourse relation features, with little attention given to combining the two. In this study, we explore two methods for jointly modeling entities and discourse relations for coherence assessment. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that integrating both types of features significantly enhances the performance of coherence models, highlighting the benefits of modeling both simultaneously for coherence evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1113
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21921–21937
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1113/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Liu and Michael Strube. 2025. Joint Modeling of Entities and Discourse Relations for Coherence Assessment. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21921–21937, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Joint Modeling of Entities and Discourse Relations for Coherence Assessment (Liu & Strube, EMNLP 2025)
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