Next TALC Seminar will take place on Wednesday, December 5th at 2pm in room A008.

Chloé Braud (Synalp) will give a presentation entitled “Transfer learning for discourse parsing”.

Abstract:
Discourse structures describe the organization of documents in terms of discourse or rhetorical relations (such as « Explanation » or « Contrast ») linking clauses and sentences. Discourse analysis could be useful for various downstream applications, such as automatic summarization, question-answering or sentiment analysis. However, the range of applications and the performance are still limited by the low scores of the existing discourse parsers and their focus on English.

Discourse parsing is known to be a hard task: It involves several complex and interacting factors, touching upon all layers of linguistic analysis, from syntax, semantics up to pragmatics. Consequently, also annotation is complex and time consuming, and hence available annotated corpora are sparse and limited in size.

In this presentation, I will present attempts to tackle these issues using transfer learning strategies. First, I will describe experiments on identifying implicit discourse relations (i.e. lacking a discourse connective such as « but » or « because ») by transferring knowledge from the explicit examples to the implicit ones, either by augmenting the size of the training set, or by building a task-tailored representation of the words.
I will then present two full discourse parsers. The first one involves a combination of several corpora annotated for different languages, leading to improvements on English and to the first systems for Basque and Dutch developed without any training data. The second parser relies on multi-task learning to transfer information among several discourse related tasks.