Skip to main content

Identifying Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7884))

Abstract

Explicit discourse relations in text are signalled by discourse connectives like since, because, however, etc. Identifying discourse connectives is a part of the bigger task called discourse parsing in which discourse coherence relations are extracted from text. In this paper we report improvements to the state-of-the-art for identifying explicit discourse connectives in the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank. These improvements have been achieved with maximum entropy (logistic regression) classifiers by combining machine learning features from previous approaches with new surface level features that capture information about a connective’s surrounding phrases and new syntactic features that add more information from the path in the syntax tree connecting the root to the connective and from the clause following the connective by means of its syntactic head.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Apache Software Foundation: Apache OpenNLP (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Charniak, E., Johnson, M.: Coarse-to-fine n-best parsing and MaxEnt discriminative reranking. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the ACL, pp. 173–180 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Collins, M.: Head-driven statistical models for natural language parsing. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Collins, M., Duffy, N.: Convolution kernels for natural language. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, pp. 625–632. MIT Press (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cristianini, N., Shawe-Taylor, J.: An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods. Cambridge University Press (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Elwell, R., Baldridge, J.: Discourse connective argument identification with connective specific rankers. In: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, pp. 198–205 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ibn Faiz, M.S.: Discovering higher order relations from biomedical text. Master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Joachims, T.: Making large-scale support vector machine learning practical. In: Schölkopf, B., Burges, C.J.C., Smola, A.J. (eds.) Advances in Kernel Methods: Support Vector Learning, pp. 169–184. MIT Press (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Knott, A.: A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Lin, Z., Ng, H.T., Kan, M.Y.: A PDTB-styled end-to-end discourse parser. CoRR. Volume arXiv:1011.0835 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  11. McClosky, D., Charniak, E., Johnson, M.: Automatic domain adaptation for parsing. In: Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL (HLT 2010), pp. 28–36 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Moschitti, A.: Making tree kernels practical for natural language learning. In: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2006), pp. 113–120 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Pitler, E., Nenkova, A.: Using syntax to disambiguate explicit discourse connectives in text. In: Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers (ACLShort 2009), pp. 13–16 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A.K., Webber, B.L.: The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Prasad, R., McRoy, S., Frid, N., Joshi, A., Yu, H.: The biomedical discourse relation bank. BMC Bioinformatics 12(1), 188–205 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Ramesh, B.P.P., Yu, H.: Identifying discourse connectives in biomedical text. In: Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium (AIMA 2010), pp. 657–661 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Ratnaparkhi, A.: Maximum entropy models for natural language ambiguity resolution. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Refaeilzadeh, P., Tang, L., Liu, H.: Cross-Validation. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Database Systems, pp. 532–538. Springer (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Roark, B., Mitchell, M., Hollingshead, K.: Syntactic complexity measures for detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment. In: Biological, Translational, and Clinical Language Processing, pp. 1–8. Association for Computational Linguistics (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Settles, B.: Biomedical named entity recognition using conditional random fields and rich feature sets. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine and its Applications (JNLPBA 2004), pp. 104–107 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Settles, B.: ABNER: An open source tool for automatically tagging genes, proteins, and other entity names in text. Bioinformatics 21(14), 3191–3192 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Sutton, C., McCallum, A.: An introduction to conditional random fields for relational learning. In: Getoor, L., Taskar, B. (eds.) Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning. MIT Press (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Vapnik, V.N.: Statistical learning theory. Wiley (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Wellner, B.: Sequence models and ranking methods for discourse parsing. PhD thesis, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Wilcoxon, F.: Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods. Biometrics Bulletin 1(6), 80–83 (1945)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Witten, I.H., Frank, E.: Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations, 1st edn. Morgan Kaufmann (1999)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Ibn Faiz, S., Mercer, R.E. (2013). Identifying Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text. In: Zaïane, O.R., Zilles, S. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7884. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38457-8_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38457-8_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38456-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38457-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics