Focus-sensitive relation disambiguation for implicit discourse relation detection

Yu Hong, Siyuan Ding, Yang Xu, Xiaoxia Jiang, Yu Wang, Jianmin Yao, Qiaoming Zhu, Guodong Zhou

Abstract: We study implicit discourse relation detection, which is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of discourse analysis. We specialize in ambiguous implicit discourse relation, which is an imperceptible linguistic phenomenon and therefore difficult to identify and eliminate. In this paper, we first create a novel task named implicit discourse relation disambiguation (IDRD). Second, we propose a focus-sensitive relation disambiguation model that affirms a truly-correct relation when it is triggered by focal sentence constituents. In addition, we specifically develop a topic-driven focus identification method and a relation search system (RSS) to support the relation disambiguation. Finally, we improve current relation detection systems by using the disambiguation model. Experiments on the penn discourse treebank (PDTB) show promising improvements.