What Causes the Failure of Explicit to Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition?
We consider an unanswered question in the discourse processing community: why do relation classifiers trained on explicit examples (with connectives removed) perform poorly in real implicit scenarios? Prior work claimed this is due to linguistic dissimilarity between explicit and implicit examples but provided no empirical evidence. In this study, we show that one cause for such failure is a label shift after connectives are eliminated. Specifically, we find that the discourse relations expressed by some explicit instances will change when connectives disappear. Unlike previous work manually analyzing a few examples, we present empirical evidence at the corpus level to prove the existence of such shift. Then, we analyze why label shift occurs by considering factors such as the syntactic role played by connectives, ambiguity of connectives, and more. Finally, we investigate two strategies to mitigate the label shift: filtering out noisy data and joint learning with connectives. Experiments on PDTB 2.0, PDTB 3.0, and the GUM dataset demonstrate that classifiers trained with our strategies outperform strong baselines.
Code (1)
Tasks
RelationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Facilitating Contrastive Learning of Discourse Relational Senses by Exploiting the Hierarchy of Sense Relations
Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task that involves identifying the sense or senses that hold between two adjacent spans of text, in the absence of an explicit connective between them. In both PDT…
Contrastive LearningRelationWhat causes a causal relation? Detecting Causal Triggers in Biomedical Scientific Discourse
What's Hard in English RST Parsing? Predictive Models for Error Analysis
Despite recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), hierarchical discourse parsing in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory remains challenging, and our understanding of the reasons for this are as yet l…
Discourse ParsingLet's be explicit about that: Distant supervision for implicit discourse relation classification via connective prediction
In implicit discourse relation classification, we want to predict the relation between adjacent sentences in the absence of any overt discourse connectives. This is challenging even for humans, leading to shortage of ann…
ClassificationImplicit Discourse Relation ClassificationImplicit RelationsLanguage Modeling+4Let’s be explicit about that: Distant supervision for implicit discourse relation classification via connective prediction
In implicit discourse relation classification, we want to predict the relation between adjacent sentences in the absence of any overt discourse connectives. This is challenging even for humans, leading to shortage of ann…
ClassificationImplicit Discourse Relation ClassificationImplicit RelationsLanguage Modeling+4