Cross-argument inference for implicit discourse relation recognition

Abstract

Motivated by the critical importance of connectives in recognizing discourse relations, we present an unsupervised cross-argument inference mechanism to implicit discourse relation recognition. The basic idea is to infer the implicit discourse relation of an argument pair from a large number of comparable argument pairs, which are automatically retrieved from the web in an unsupervised way. In this way, the inference proceeds from explicit relations to implicit ones via connective as bridge. This kind of pair-to-pair inference is based on the assumption that two argument pairs with high content similarity (i.e. comparable argument pairs) should have similar discourse relationship. Evaluation on PDTB proves the effectiveness of our inference mechanism in implicit relation recognition to the four level-1 relations. It also shows that our mechanism significantly outperforms other alternatives.