Unsupervised Discourse Constituency Parsing Using Viterbi EM

In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised discourse constituency parsing algorithm. We use Viterbi EM with a margin-based criterion to train a span-based discourse parser in an unsupervised manner. We also propose initialization methods for Viterbi training of discourse constituents based on our p...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nishida, Noriki, Nakayama, Hideki
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: The MIT Press 2020-07-01
Series:Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Online Access:https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/tacl_a_00312
Description
Summary:In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised discourse constituency parsing algorithm. We use Viterbi EM with a margin-based criterion to train a span-based discourse parser in an unsupervised manner. We also propose initialization methods for Viterbi training of discourse constituents based on our prior knowledge of text structures. Experimental results demonstrate that our unsupervised parser achieves comparable or even superior performance to fully supervised parsers. We also investigate discourse constituents that are learned by our method.
ISSN:2307-387X