Detection, Disambiguation and Argument Identification of Discourse Connectives in Chinese Discourse Parsing

In this paper, we investigate four important issues together for explicit discourse relation labelling in Chinese texts: (1) discourse connective extraction, (2) linking ambiguity resolution, (3) relation type disambiguation, and (4) argument boundary identification. In a pipelined Chinese discourse parser, we identify potential connective candidates by string matching, eliminate non-discourse usages from them with a binary classifier, resolve linking ambiguities among connective components by ranking, disambiguate relation types by a multiway classifier, and determine the argument boundaries by conditional random fields. The experiments on Chinese Discourse Treebank show that the F1 scores of 0.7506, 0.7693, 0.7458, and 0.3134 are achieved for discourse usage disambiguation, linking disambiguation, relation type disambiguation, and argument boundary identification, respectively, in a pipelined Chinese discourse parser.