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.

Named entity recognition (NER) remains challenging when entity mentions can be discontinuous. Existing methods break the recognition process into several sequential steps. In training, they predict conditioned on the golden intermediate results, while at inference relying on the model output of the previous steps, which introduces exposure bias. To solve this problem, we first construct a segment graph for each sentence, in which each node denotes a segment (a continuous entity on its own, or a part of discontinuous entities), and an edge links two nodes that belong to the same entity. The nodes and edges can be generated respectively in one stage with a grid tagging scheme and learned jointly using a novel architecture named Mac. Then discontinuous NER can be reformulated as a non-parametric process of discovering maximal cliques in the graph and concatenating the spans in each clique. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, with up to 3.5 percentage points improvement on F1, and achieves 5x speedup over the SOTA model.

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.