2017/02/03 by Eric Malmi, Daniele Pighin, Malmi, Eric +5
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1702.00992
openalex publication_date 2017/02/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Accurate prediction of suitable discourse connectives (however, furthermore, etc.) is a key component of any system aimed at building coherent and fluent discourses from shorter sentences and passages. As an example, a dialog system might assemble a long and informative answer by sampling passages extracted from different documents retrieved from the Web. We formulate the task of discourse connective prediction and release a dataset of 2.9M sentence pairs separated by discourse connectives for this task. Then, we evaluate the hardness of the task for human raters, apply a recently proposed decomposable attention (DA) model to this task and observe that the automatic predictor has a higher F1 than human raters (32 vs. 30). Nevertheless, under specific conditions the raters still outperform the DA model, suggesting that there is headroom for future improvements.