Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text

What it is about

Discourse connectives such as "once", "since" and "and" are often ambiguous in two ways: between a discourse use and a non-discourse use, and between discourse senses. The paper shows that syntax helps in both tasks. It uses gold Penn Treebank parses of the PDTB articles. The syntactic features are the category of the connective's node, of its parent, of its left and right siblings, and two flags on the right sibling (contains a VP, contains a trace). For discourse vs non-discourse usage, a maximum-entropy classifier with 10-fold cross-validation over sections 2 to 22 reaches F 75.33 with the connective string alone, 88.19 with syntax only, 92.28 with both, 93.63 with connective-syntax interactions, and 94.19 with syntax-syntax interactions. For the four top-level senses, a Naive Bayes classifier reaches 93.67% accuracy with the connective alone and 94.15% with syntax. The earlier surface-based result of Marcu (2000) was F 84.9, on a different corpus.

Ideas

• I1. A gate for connectives in en parse output: an explicit decision list ("right sibling is a clause, so discourse use") with a reason stored per decision. Measure it on held-out data only, because the PDTB data are evaluation only.
• I2. Keep a connective table in 36. Discourse relations and coherence as a BTreeMap from each connective to the syntactic contexts that it accepts. The paper says 11 connectives are discourse more than 90% of the time; start there.
• I3. The paper uses constituency categories. Translate the features to UD: the deprel of the connective's head and of its right dependent. Report how much of the gain survives on the parser output of en/src/parse.rs, since the paper's numbers used gold trees.
• I4. Negative control: replace the syntactic features with the labels of shuffled parents. The gain over the connective string must disappear.

For Mova

The code is en/src/parse.rs and en/src/tok.rs. The chapters are 36. Discourse relations and coherence, 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech and 19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register. The measure is accuracy and F on the discourse vs non-discourse decision, run twice on the same split, with gold and parser trees reported separately.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{pitler2009using,
  title = {{Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text}},
  author = {Pitler, Emily and Nenkova, Ani},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P09-2004/}
}

References

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