Analysis of Discourse Structure with Syntactic Dependencies and Data-Driven Shift-Reduce Parsing

We present an efficient approach for discourse parsing within and across sentences, where the unit of processing is an entire document, and not a single sentence. We apply shift-reduce algorithms for dependency and constituent parsing to determine syntactic dependencies for the sentences in a document, and subsequently a Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) tree for the entire document. Our results show that our linear-time shift-reduce framework achieves high accuracy and a large improvement in efficiency compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on chart parsing with dynamic programming.

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