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A Unified Document-Level Chinese Discourse Parser on Different Granularity Levels

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Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2023 (ICDAR 2023)

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Abstract

Discourse parsing aims to comprehend the structure and semantics of a document. Some previous studies have taken multiple levels of granularity methods to parse documents while disregarding the connection between granularity levels. Additionally, almost all the Chinese discourse parsing approaches concentrated on a single granularity due to lacking annotated corpora. To address the above issues, we propose a unified document-level Chinese discourse parser based on multi-granularity levels, which leverages granularity connections between paragraphs and Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) in a document. Specifically, we first identify EDU-level discourse trees and then introduce a structural encoding module to capture EDU-level structural and semantic information. It can significantly promote the construction of paragraph-level discourse trees. Moreover, we construct the Unified Chinese Discourse TreeBank (UCDTB), which includes 467 articles with annotations from clauses to the whole article, filling the gap in existing unified corpus resources on Chinese discourse parsing. The experiments on both Chinese UCDTB and English RST-DT show that our model outperforms the SOTA baselines.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We tried to embed the relationship in, but it did not work well.

  2. 2.

    In practice we use one pair of structure labels \(\left\langle unused1\right\rangle \) and \(\left\langle unused2\right\rangle \) to represent the left and right brackets.

  3. 3.

    In practice we use three pairs of labels \(\left\langle unused1\right\rangle \) and \(\left\langle unused2\right\rangle \), \(\left\langle unused3\right\rangle \) and \(\left\langle unused4\right\rangle \), \(\left\langle unused5\right\rangle \) and \(\left\langle unused6\right\rangle \) to correspond to the three pairs of tags \((_N\) and \()_S\), \((_S\) and \()_N\), \((_N\) and \()_N\).

  4. 4.

    Same as the structural encoding module, we encode by using XLNet-base.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61836007 and 62276177), and Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD).

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Correspondence to Qiaoming Zhu .

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Liu, W., Jiang, F., Fan, Y., Chu, X., Li, P., Zhu, Q. (2023). A Unified Document-Level Chinese Discourse Parser on Different Granularity Levels. In: Fink, G.A., Jain, R., Kise, K., Zanibbi, R. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition - ICDAR 2023. ICDAR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14187. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41676-7_17

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