Discourse Chunking and its Application to Sentence Compression

In this paper we consider the problem of analysing sentence-level discourse structure. We introduce discourse chunking (i.e., the identification of intra-sentential nucleus and satellite spans) as an alternative to full-scale discourse parsing. Our experiments show that the proposed modelling approach yields results comparable to state-of-the-art while exploiting knowledge-lean features and small amounts of discourse annotations. We also demonstrate how discourse chunking can be successfully applied to a sentence compression task.

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