Predicting the Presence of Discourse Connectives

We present a classification model that predicts the presence or omission of a lexical connective between two clauses, based upon linguistic features of the clauses and the type of discourse relation holding between them. The model is trained on a set of high frequency relations extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and achieves an accuracy of 86.6%. Analysis of the results reveals that the most informative features relate to the discourse dependencies between sequences of coherence relations in the text. We also present results of an experiment that provides insight into the nature and difficulty of the task.

[1]  Jerry R. Hobbs.  Coherence and Coreference , 1979, Cogn. Sci..

[2]  William C. Mann,et al.  Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization , 1988 .

[3]  Michael Elhadad,et al.  Generating Connectives , 1990, COLING.

[4]  Beatrice Santorini,et al.  Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank , 1993, CL.

[5]  Andrew Kehler,et al.  Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar , 2002, CSLI lecture notes series.

[6]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Logics of Conversation , 2005, Studies in natural language processing.

[7]  Ani Nenkova,et al.  Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations , 2008, COLING.

[8]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Edinburgh Research Explorer Using automatically labelled examples to classify rhetorical relations: an assessment , 2022 .

[9]  Livio Robaldo,et al.  The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. , 2008, LREC.

[10]  Ani Nenkova,et al.  Automatic sense prediction for implicit discourse relations in text , 2009, ACL.

[11]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  Recognizing Implicit Discourse Relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank , 2009, EMNLP.

[12]  Jian Su,et al.  Predicting Discourse Connectives for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition , 2010, COLING.

[13]  Fatemeh Torabi.  Measuring the Strength of Linguistic Cues for Discourse Relations , 2012 .

[14]  Vera Demberg,et al.  Measuring the Strength of Linguistic Cues for Discourse Relations , 2012 .

[15]  Vera Demberg,et al.  Implicitness of Discourse Relations , 2012, COLING.