Aaron Lee


2020

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Discourse as a Function of Event: Profiling Discourse Structure in News Articles around the Main Event
Prafulla Kumar Choubey | Aaron Lee | Ruihong Huang | Lu Wang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Understanding discourse structures of news articles is vital to effectively contextualize the occurrence of a news event. To enable computational modeling of news structures, we apply an existing theory of functional discourse structure for news articles that revolves around the main event and create a human-annotated corpus of 802 documents spanning over four domains and three media sources. Next, we propose several document-level neural-network models to automatically construct news content structures. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating system predicted news structures yields new state-of-the-art performance for event coreference resolution. The news documents we annotated are openly available and the annotations are publicly released for future research.