Towards the Unsupervised Acquisition of Discourse Relations

This paper describes a novel approach towards the empirical approximation of discourse relations between different utterances in texts. Following the idea that every pair of events comes with preferences regarding the range and frequency of discourse relations connecting both parts, the paper investigates whether these preferences are manifested in the distribution of relation words (that serve to signal these relations). Experiments on two large-scale English web corpora show that significant correlations between pairs of adjacent events and relation words exist, that they are reproducible on different data sets, and for three relation words, that their distribution corresponds to theorybased assumptions. 1 Motivation Texts are not merely accumulations of isolated utterances, but the arrangement of utterances conveys meaning; human text understanding can thus be described as a process to recover the global structure of texts and the relations linking its different parts (Vallduv´ı...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Christian Chiarcos
• Keywords: ACL 2012, Computational Linguistics, Discourse Relations, Discourse Segments, Global Structure