Extending Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition to the PDTB-3

Abstract

The PDTB-3 contains many more Implicit discourse relations than the previous PDTB-2. This is in part because implicit relations have now been annotated within sentences as well as between them. In addition, some now co-occur with explicit discourse relations, instead of standing on their own. Here we show that while this can complicate the problem of identifying the location of implicit discourse relations, it can in turn simplify the problem of identifying their senses. We present data to support this claim, as well as methods that can serve as a non-trivial baseline for future state-of-the-art recognizers for implicit discourse relations.