Discourse Relation-Enhanced Neural Coherence Modeling

Wei Liu, Michael Strube


Abstract
Discourse coherence theories posit relations between text spans as a key feature of coherent texts. However, existing work on coherence modeling has paid little attention to discourse relations. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that relation features are correlated with text coherence. Then, we investigate a novel fusion model that uses position-aware attention and a visible matrix to combine text- and relation-based features for coherence assessment. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that our approaches can significantly improve baselines, demonstrating the importance of relation features for coherence modeling.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.236
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4748–4762
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.236/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Liu and Michael Strube. 2025. Discourse Relation-Enhanced Neural Coherence Modeling. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4748–4762, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discourse Relation-Enhanced Neural Coherence Modeling (Liu & Strube, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.236.pdf