MEGA RST Discourse Treebanks with Structure and Nuclearity from Scalable Distant Sentiment Supervision (EMNLP 2020)

Abstract

The lack of large and diverse discourse treebanks hinders the application of data-driven approaches, such as deep-learning, to RST-style discourse parsing. In this work, we present a novel scalable methodology to automatically generate discourse treebanks using distant supervision from sentiment-annotated datasets, creating and publishing MEGA-DT, a new large-scale discourse-annotated corpus. Our approach generates discourse trees incorporating structure and nuclearity for documents of arbitrary length by relying on an efficient heuristic beam-search strategy, extended with a stochastic component. Experiments on multiple datasets indicate that a discourse parser trained on our MEGA-DT treebank delivers promising inter-domain performance gains when compared to parsers trained on human-annotated discourse corpora.

Source code

Github

Paper

ACL Anthology

ArXiv

Dataset
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APPENDIX

THIRD PARTY LIBRARIES

PyTorch, Copyright (c) 2016-Facebook, Inc (Adam Paszke) obtained under the BSD licence, found here: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/LICENSE

Two-Stage Parser, Copyright (c) 2019 Yizhong Wang, found here: https://github.com/yizhongw/StageDP

MILNet, Copyright (c) Stefanos Angelidis, found here: https://github.com/stangelid/oposum

Updates

Citation(s)

If you use our dataset, code or any parts thereof, please cite this paper:

@inproceedings{huber-carenini-2020-mega,
   title = "{MEGA} {RST} Discourse Treebanks with Structure and Nuclearity from Scalable Distant Sentiment Supervision",
   author = "Huber, Patrick and Carenini, Giuseppe",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
   month = nov,
   year = "2020",
   address = "Online",
   publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
   url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.emnlp-main.603",
   pages = "7442--7457"
}