Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown great potentials in natural language processing (NLP) including rhetorical structure theory (RST) discourse parsing.Current PLMs are obtained by sentence-level pre-training, which is different from the basic processing unit, i.e. element discourse unit (EDU).To this end, we propose a second-stage EDU-level pre-training approach in this work, which presents two novel tasks to learn effective EDU representations continually based on well pre-trained language models.Concretely, the two tasks are (1) next EDU prediction (NEP) and (2) discourse marker prediction (DMP).We take a state-of-the-art transition-based neural parser as baseline, and adopt it with a light bi-gram EDU modification to effectively explore the EDU-level pre-trained EDU representation.Experimental results on a benckmark dataset show that our method is highly effective,leading a 2.1-point improvement in F1-score.All codes and pre-trained models will be released publicly to facilitate future studies.

Due to the increasing use of service chatbots in E-commerce platforms in recent years, customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) is gaining more and more attention. CSP is dedicated to evaluating subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service and thus helps improve customer service experience. However, previous methods focus on modeling customer-chatbot interaction across different turns, which are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. In this work, we investigate the problem of satisfaction states tracking and its effects on CSP in E-commerce service chatbots. To this end, we propose a dialogue-level classification model named DialogueCSP to track satisfaction states for CSP. In particular, we explore a novel two-step interaction module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. In order to capture dialogue-level satisfaction states for CSP, we further introduce dialogue-aware attentions to integrate historical informative cues into the interaction module. To evaluate the proposed approach, we also build a Chinese E-commerce dataset for CSP. Experiment results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms multiple baselines, illustrating the benefits of satisfaction states tracking on CSP.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP community. Recent works of SRL mainly fall into two lines: 1) BIO-based; 2) span-based. Despite ubiquity, they share some intrinsic drawbacks of not considering internal argument structures, potentially hindering the model’s expressiveness. The key challenge is arguments are flat structures, and there are no determined subtree realizations for words inside arguments. To remedy this, in this paper, we propose to regard flat argument spans as latent subtrees, accordingly reducing SRL to a tree parsing task. In particular, we equip our formulation with a novel span-constrained TreeCRF to make tree structures span-aware and further extend it to the second-order case. We conduct extensive experiments on CoNLL05 and CoNLL12 benchmarks. Results reveal that our methods perform favorably better than all previous syntax-agnostic works, achieving new state-of-the-art under both end-to-end and w/ gold predicates settings.

Discourse parsing on multi-party dialogues is an important but difficult task in dialogue systems and conversational analysis. It is believed that speaker interactions are helpful for this task. However, most previous research ignores speaker interactions between different speakers. To this end, we present a speaker-aware model for this task. Concretely, we propose a speaker-context interaction joint encoding (SCIJE) approach, using the interaction features between different speakers. In addition, we propose a second-stage pre-training task, same speaker prediction (SSP), enhancing the conversational context representations by predicting whether two utterances are from the same speaker. Experiments on two standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed model achieves the best-reported performance in the literature. We will release the codes of this paper to facilitate future research.

Opinion Role Labeling (ORL), aiming to identify the key roles of opinion, has received increasing interest. Unlike most of the previous works focusing on the English language, in this paper, we present the first work of Chinese ORL. We construct a Chinese dataset by manually translating and projecting annotations from a standard English MPQA dataset. Then, we investigate the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer methods, including model transfer and corpus translation. We exploit multilingual BERT with Contextual Parameter Generator and Adapter methods to examine the potentials of unsupervised cross-lingual learning and our experiments and analyses for both bilingual and multilingual transfers establish a foundation for the future research of this task.

Emotion recognition in multi-party conversation (ERMC) is becoming increasingly popular as an emerging research topic in natural language processing. Prior research focuses on exploring sequential information but ignores the discourse structures of conversations. In this paper, we investigate the importance of discourse structures in handling informative contextual cues and speaker-specific features for ERMC. To this end, we propose a discourse-aware graph neural network (ERMC-DisGCN) for ERMC. In particular, we design a relational convolution to lever the self-speaker dependency of interlocutors to propagate contextual information. Furthermore, we exploit a gated convolution to select more informative cues for ERMC from dependent utterances. The experimental results show our method outperforms multiple baselines, illustrating that discourse structures are of great value to ERMC.

Sentence matching aims to identify the special relationship between two sentences, and plays a key role in many natural language processing tasks. However, previous studies mainly focused on exploiting either syntactic or semantic information for sentence matching, and no studies consider integrating both of them. In this study, we propose integrating syntax and semantics into BERT with sentence matching. In particular, we use an implicit syntax and semantics integration method that is less sensitive to the output structure information. Thus the implicit integration can alleviate the error propagation problem. The experimental results show that our approach has achieved state-of-the-art or competitive performance on several sentence matching datasets, demonstrating the benefits of implicitly integrating syntactic and semantic features in sentence matching.

Opinion role labeling (ORL) is an important task for fine-grained opinion mining, which identifies important opinion arguments such as holder and target for a given opinion trigger. The task is highly correlative with semantic role labeling (SRL), which identifies important semantic arguments such as agent and patient for a given predicate. As predicate agents and patients usually correspond to opinion holders and targets respectively, SRL could be valuable for ORL. In this work, we propose a simple and novel method to enhance ORL by utilizing SRL, presenting semantic-aware word representations which are learned from SRL. The representations are then fed into a baseline neural ORL model as basic inputs. We verify the proposed method on a benchmark MPQA corpus. Experimental results show that the proposed method is highly effective. In addition, we compare the method with two representative methods of SRL integration as well, finding that our method can outperform the two methods significantly, achieving 1.47% higher F-scores than the better one.

Syntax has been demonstrated highly effective in neural machine translation (NMT). Previous NMT models integrate syntax by representing 1-best tree outputs from a well-trained parsing system, e.g., the representative Tree-RNN and Tree-Linearization methods, which may suffer from error propagation. In this work, we propose a novel method to integrate source-side syntax implicitly for NMT. The basic idea is to use the intermediate hidden representations of a well-trained end-to-end dependency parser, which are referred to as syntax-aware word representations (SAWRs). Then, we simply concatenate such SAWRs with ordinary word embeddings to enhance basic NMT models. The method can be straightforwardly integrated into the widely-used sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) NMT models. We start with a representative RNN-based Seq2Seq baseline system, and test the effectiveness of our proposed method on two benchmark datasets of the Chinese-English and English-Vietnamese translation tasks, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to bring significant BLEU score improvements on the two datasets compared with the baseline, 1.74 points for Chinese-English translation and 0.80 point for English-Vietnamese translation, respectively. In addition, the approach also outperforms the explicit Tree-RNN and Tree-Linearization methods.

Treebank translation is a promising method for cross-lingual transfer of syntactic dependency knowledge. The basic idea is to map dependency arcs from a source treebank to its target translation according to word alignments. This method, however, can suffer from imperfect alignment between source and target words. To address this problem, we investigate syntactic transfer by code mixing, translating only confident words in a source treebank. Cross-lingual word embeddings are leveraged for transferring syntactic knowledge to the target from the resulting code-mixed treebank. Experiments on University Dependency Treebanks show that code-mixed treebanks are more effective than translated treebanks, giving highly competitive performances among cross-lingual parsing methods.

Syntax has been a useful source of information for statistical RST discourse parsing. Under the neural setting, a common approach integrates syntax by a recursive neural network (RNN), requiring discrete output trees produced by a supervised syntax parser. In this paper, we propose an implicit syntax feature extraction approach, using hidden-layer vectors extracted from a neural syntax parser. In addition, we propose a simple transition-based model as the baseline, further enhancing it with dynamic oracle. Experiments on the standard dataset show that our baseline model with dynamic oracle is highly competitive. When implicit syntax features are integrated, we are able to obtain further improvements, better than using explicit Tree-RNN.

Neural networks have shown promising results for relation extraction. State-of-the-art models cast the task as an end-to-end problem, solved incrementally using a local classifier. Yet previous work using statistical models have demonstrated that global optimization can achieve better performances compared to local classification. We build a globally optimized neural model for end-to-end relation extraction, proposing novel LSTM features in order to better learn context representations. In addition, we present a novel method to integrate syntactic information to facilitate global learning, yet requiring little background on syntactic grammars thus being easy to extend. Experimental results show that our proposed model is highly effective, achieving the best performances on two standard benchmarks.

Sarcasm detection has been modeled as a binary document classification task, with rich features being defined manually over input documents. Traditional models employ discrete manual features to address the task, with much research effect being devoted to the design of effective feature templates. We investigate the use of neural network for tweet sarcasm detection, and compare the effects of the continuous automatic features with discrete manual features. In particular, we use a bi-directional gated recurrent neural network to capture syntactic and semantic information over tweets locally, and a pooling neural network to extract contextual features automatically from history tweets. Results show that neural features give improved accuracies for sarcasm detection, with different error distributions compared with discrete manual features.