Where Are We in Discourse Relation Recognition?

Katherine Atwell, Junyi Jessy Li, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
Discourse parsers recognize the intentional and inferential relationships that organize extended texts. They have had a great influence on a variety of NLP tasks as well as theoretical studies in linguistics and cognitive science. However it is often difficult to achieve good results from current discourse models, largely due to the difficulty of the task, particularly recognizing implicit discourse relations. Recent developments in transformer-based models have shown great promise on these analyses, but challenges still remain. We present a position paper which provides a systematic analysis of the state of the art discourse parsers. We aim to examine the performance of current discourse parsing models via gradual domain shift: within the corpus, on in-domain texts, and on out-of-domain texts, and discuss the differences between the transformer-based models and the previous models in predicting different types of implicit relations both inter- and intra-sentential. We conclude by describing several shortcomings of the existing models and a discussion of how future work should approach this problem.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
314–325
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.34
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katherine Atwell, Junyi Jessy Li, and Malihe Alikhani. 2021. Where Are We in Discourse Relation Recognition?. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 314–325, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Where Are We in Discourse Relation Recognition? (Atwell et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2021.sigdial-1.34.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTpLGN8QvY
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