This paper demonstrates discopy, a novel framework that makes it easy to design components for end-to-end shallow discourse parsing. For the purpose of demonstration, we implement recent neural approaches and integrate contextualized word embeddings to predict explicit and non-explicit discourse relations. Our proposed neural feature-free system performs competitively to systems presented at the latest Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing. Finally, a web front end is shown that simplifies the inspection of annotated documents. The source code, documentation, and pretrained models are publicly accessible.

This paper studies a novel model that simplifies the disambiguation of connectives for explicit discourse relations. We use a neural approach that integrates contextualized word embeddings and predicts whether a connective candidate is part of a discourse relation or not. We study the influence of those context-specific embeddings. Further, we show the benefit of training the tasks of connective disambiguation and sense classification together at the same time. The success of our approach is supported by state-of-the-art results.

This paper describes a novel application of semi-supervision for shallow discourse parsing. We use a neural approach for sequence tagging and focus on the extraction of explicit discourse arguments. First, additional unlabeled data is prepared for semi-supervised learning. From this data, weak annotations are generated in a first setting and later used in another setting to study performance differences. In our studies, we show an increase in the performance of our models that ranges between 2-10% F1 score. Further, we give some insights to the generated discourse annotations and compare the developed additional relations with the training relations. We release this new dataset of explicit discourse arguments to enable the training of large statistical models.

This paper describes a novel approach for the task of end-to-end argument labeling in shallow discourse parsing. Our method describes a decomposition of the overall labeling task into subtasks and a general distance-based aggregation procedure. For learning these subtasks, we train a recurrent neural network and gradually replace existing components of our baseline by our model. The model is trained and evaluated on the Penn Discourse Treebank 2 corpus. While it is not as good as knowledge-intense approaches, it clearly outperforms other models that are also trained without additional linguistic features.