A CDT-Styled End-to-End Chinese Discourse Parser

Abstract

Discourse parsing is a challenging task and plays a critical role in discourse analysis. Since the release of the Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank and the Penn Discourse Treebank, the research on English discourse parsing has attracted increasing attention and achieved considerable success in recent years. At the same time, some preliminary research on certain subtasks about discourse parsing for other languages, such as Chinese, has been conducted. In this article, we present an end-to-end Chinese discourse parser with the Connective-Driven Dependency Tree scheme, which consists of multiple components in a pipeline architecture, such as the elementary discourse unit (EDU) detector, discourse relation recognizer, discourse parse tree generator, and attribution labeler. In particular, the attribution labeler determines two attributions (i.e., sense and centering) for every nonterminal node (i.e., discourse relation) in the discourse parse trees. Systematically, our parser detects all EDUs in a free text, generates the discourse parse tree in a bottom-up way, and determines the sense and centering attributions for all nonterminal nodes by traversing the discourse parse tree. Comprehensive evaluation on the Connective-Driven Dependency Treebank corpus from both component-wise and error-cascading perspectives is conducted to illustrate how each component performs in isolation, and how the pipeline performs with error propagation. Finally, it shows that our end-to-end Chinese discourse parser achieves an overall F1 score of 20% with full automation.