Predicting Discourse Structure using Distant Supervision from Sentiment

Patrick Huber, Giuseppe Carenini


Abstract
Discourse parsing could not yet take full advantage of the neural NLP revolution, mostly due to the lack of annotated datasets. We propose a novel approach that uses distant supervision on an auxiliary task (sentiment classification), to generate abundant data for RST-style discourse structure prediction. Our approach combines a neural variant of multiple-instance learning, using document-level supervision, with an optimal CKY-style tree generation algorithm. In a series of experiments, we train a discourse parser (for only structure prediction) on our automatically generated dataset and compare it with parsers trained on human-annotated corpora (news domain RST-DT and Instructional domain). Results indicate that while our parser does not yet match the performance of a parser trained and tested on the same dataset (intra-domain), it does perform remarkably well on the much more difficult and arguably more useful task of inter-domain discourse structure prediction, where the parser is trained on one domain and tested/applied on another one.
Anthology ID:
D19-1235
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2306–2316
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1235
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1235
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Huber and Giuseppe Carenini. 2019. Predicting Discourse Structure using Distant Supervision from Sentiment. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2306–2316, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Discourse Structure using Distant Supervision from Sentiment (Huber & Carenini, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1235.pdf