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Focus-sensitive relation disambiguation for implicit discourse relation detection

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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.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61672368, 61373097, 61672367, 61331011), the Research Foundation of the Ministry of Education and China Mobile (MCM20150602) and Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu (BK20151222). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Language Processing Lab, School of Computer Science & Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, China

    Yu Hong, Siyuan Ding, Yang Xu, Jianmin Yao, Qiaoming Zhu & Guodong Zhou

  2. Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, Nanjing, 210007, China

    Xiaoxia Jiang & Yu Wang

Authors
  1. Yu Hong
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  2. Siyuan Ding
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  3. Yang Xu
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  4. Xiaoxia Jiang
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  5. Yu Wang
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  6. Jianmin Yao
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  7. Qiaoming Zhu
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  8. Guodong Zhou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu Hong.

Additional information

Yu Hong is an associate professor in Soochow University, China. He is corresponding author. His main research interests focuses on personal information retrieval, topic detection and tracking, discourse analysis and event extraction.

Siyuan Ding is a master in Soochow University, China. His main research interests focuses on event relation detection and discourse relation identification.

Yang Xu is a master in Soochow University, China. Her main research interests focuses on event relation detection and discourse relation identification.

Xiaoxia Jiang serves in the Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Lab, China. She is interested in the research of natural language processing.

Yu Wang serves in the Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Lab, China. His research interests include big data processing and complex network analysis.

Jianmin Yao is a PhD, professor in Soochow University, China. His main research interests are in the fields of machine translation and cross-language information retrieval.

Qiaoming Zhu is a PhD supervisor, professor in Soochow University. His main research interests focuses on Chinese information processing and natural language understanding.

Guodong Zhou is a PhD supervisor, professor in Soochow University, China. His main research interests focuses on natural language understanding, information extraction, statistical machine translation, and machine learning.

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Hong, Y., Ding, S., Xu, Y. et al. Focus-sensitive relation disambiguation for implicit discourse relation detection. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 1266–1281 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-017-6558-y

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