Malta

Good scientific writing makes use of specific sentence and paragraph structures, providing a rich platform for discourse analysis and developing tools to enhance text readability. In this vein, we introduce SciPara, a novel dataset consisting of 981 scientific paragraphs annotated by experts in terms of sentence discourse types and topic information. On this dataset, we explored two tasks: 1) discourse category classification, which is to predict the discourse category of a sentence by using its paragraph and surrounding paragraphs as context, and 2) discourse sentence generation, which is to generate a sentence of a certain discourse category by using various contexts as input. We found that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can accurately identify Topic Sentences in SciPara, but have difficulty distinguishing Concluding, Transition, and Supporting Sentences. The quality of the sentences generated by all investigated PLMs improved with amount of context, regardless of discourse category. However, not all contexts were equally influential. Contrary to common assumptions about well-crafted scientific paragraphs, our analysis revealed that paradoxically, paragraphs with complete discourse structures were less readable.

EACL 2024

SciPara: A New Dataset for Investigating Paragraph Discourse Structure in Scientific Papers

sentence generation

sentence classification

scholarly document processing

nlp applications

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

This paper presents evidence for an effect of genre on the use of discourse connectives in argumentation. Drawing from discourse processing research on reasoning based structures, we use fill-mask computation to measure genre-induced expectations of argument realisation, and beta regression to model the probabilities of these realisations against a set of predictors. Contrasting fill-mask probabilities for the presence or absence of a discourse connective in baseline and finetuned language models reveals that genre introduces biases for the realisation of argument structure. These outcomes suggest that cross-domain discourse processing, but also argument mining, should take into account generalisations about specific features, such as connectives, and their probability related to the genre context.

Using Discourse Connectives to Test Genre Bias in Masked Language Models

We present a pipeline for multi-lingual Shallow Discourse Parsing. The pipeline exploits Machine Translation and Word Alignment, by translating any incoming non-English input text into English, applying an English discourse parser, and projecting the found relations onto the original input text through word alignments. While the purpose of the pipeline is to provide rudimentary discourse relation annotations for low-resource languages, in order to get an idea of performance, we evaluate it on the sub-task of discourse connective identification for several languages for which gold data are available. We experiment with different setups of our modular pipeline architecture and analyze intermediate results. Our code is made available on GitHub.

Projecting Annotations for Discourse Relations: Connective Identification for Low-Resource Languages

Discourse segmentation received increased attention in the past years, however the majority of studies have focused on written genres and with high-resource languages. This paper investigates discourse segmentation of a Taiwan Southern Min spontaneous speech corpus. We compare the fine-tuning a Language Model (LLM using two approaches: supervised, thanks to a high-quality annotated dataset, and weakly-supervised, requiring only a small amount of manual labeling. The corpus used here is transcribed with both Chinese characters and romanized transcription. This allows us to compare the impact of the written form on the discourse segmentation task. Additionally, the dataset includes manual prosodic breaks labeling, allowing an exploration of the role prosody can play in contemporary discourse segmentation systems grounded in LLMs. In our study, the supervised approach outperforms weak-supervision ; character-based version demonstrated better scores compared to the romanized version; and prosodic information proved to be an interesting source to increase discourse segmentation performance.

Experimenting with Discourse Segmentation of Taiwan Southern Min Spontaneous Speech

The identification of political actors who put forward claims in public debate is a crucial step in the construction of discourse networks, which are helpful to analyze societal debates. Actor identification is, however, rather challenging: Often, the locally mentioned speaker of a claim is only a pronoun ("He proposed that [claim]"), so recovering the canonical actor name requires discourse understanding. We compare a traditional pipeline of dedicated NLP components (similar to those applied to the related task of coreference) with a LLM, which appears a good match for this generation task. Evaluating on a corpus of German actors in newspaper reports, we find surprisingly that the LLM performs worse. Further analysis reveals that the LLM is very good at identifying the right reference, but struggles to generate the correct canonical form. This points to an underlying issue in LLMs with controlling generated output. Indeed, a hybrid model combining the LLM with a classifier to normalize its output substantially outperforms both initial models.

Actor Identification in Discourse: A Challenge for LLMs?

We provide a new linguistic resource: The Minecraft Structured Dialogue Corpus (MSDC), a discourse annotated version of the Minecraft Dialogue Corpus (MDC), with complete discourse structures for the situated dialogues in the style of SDRT. Our structures feature both linguistic discourse moves and nonlinguistic actions.

Discourse Structure Annotations for the Minecraft Dialogue Corpus

Writing research articles is crucial in any academic's development and is thus an important component of the academic discourse. The Introduction section is often seen as a difficult task within the research article genre. This study presents two metrics of rhetorical moves in academic writing: step-n-grams and lengths of steps. While scholars agree that expert writers follow the general pattern described in the CARS model (Swales, 1990), this study complements previous studies with empirical quantitative data that highlight how writers progress from one rhetorical function to another in practice, based on 50 recent papers by expert writers. The discussion shows the significance of the results in relation to writing instructors and data-driven learning.

Quantitative metrics to the CARS model in academic discourse in biology introductions

With the raise of large language models (LLMs), different evaluation methods, including probing methods, are gaining more attention. Probing methods are meant to evaluate LLMs on their linguistic abilities. However, most of the studies are focused on morphology and syntax, leaving discourse research out of the scope. At the same time, understanding discourse and pragmatics is crucial to building up the conversational abilities of models.

In this paper, we address the problem of probing several models of discourse knowledge in 10 languages. We present an algorithm to automatically adapt existing discourse tasks to other languages based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation. We find that models perform similarly on high- and low-resourced languages. However, the overall low performance of the models' quality shows that they do not acquire discourse well enough.

Probing of pretrained multilingual models on the knowledge of discourse

Discourse relation classification within a multilingual, cross-framework setting is a challenging task, 
and the best-performing systems so far have relied on monolingual and mono-framework approaches.
In this paper, we introduce transformer-based multilingual models, trained jointly over all datasets---thus covering different languages and discourse frameworks. We demonstrate their ability to outperform single-corpus models and to overcome (to some extent) the disparity among corpora, by relying on linguistic features and generic information about the nature of the datasets. We also compare the performance of different multilingual pretrained models, as well as the encoding of the relation direction, a key component for the task. Our results on the 16 datasets of the DISRPT 2021 benchmark show improvements in accuracy in (almost) all datasets compared to the monolingual models, with at best $65.91$\% in average accuracy, thus corresponding to a 4% improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Feature-augmented model for multilingual discourse relation classification

The task of discourse relation recognition within dialogs presents unique challenges. Recent advancements in discourse relation recognition have focused on prompting Pre-Trained Language Models (PLMs) to predict connectives between argument pairs. However, connectives don't play a significant role in dialog, rendering previous approaches employed in monologues less effective. To address this challenge and better leverage knowledge embedded in PLMs, we propose to integrate the Question Under Discussion (QUD) linguistic framework into the task of discourse relation recognition in dialog. We hypothesize that generating free-form questions to represent the relationships between utterances will help with this task. Early findings from this approach are promising, and we plan to continue our investigation.

Exploiting Questions Under Discussion for Discourse Relation Recognition in Dialog

Question Generation (QG), the process of generating meaningful questions from a given context, has proven to be useful for several tasks such as question answering or FAQ generation. While most existing QG techniques generate simple, fact-based questions, this research aims to generate questions that can have complex answers (e.g. "why" questions). We propose a data augmentation method that uses discourse relations to create such questions, and experiment on existing English data. Our approach generates questions based solely on the context without answer supervision, in order to enhance question diversity and complexity. We use an encoder-decoder trained on the augmented dataset to generate either one question or multiple questions at a time, and show that the latter improves over the baseline model when doing a human quality evaluation, without degrading performance according to standard automated metrics.

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SciPara: A New Dataset for Investigating Paragraph Discourse Structure in Scientific Papers

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Using Discourse Connectives to Test Genre Bias in Masked Language Models

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