Combining Intra- and Multi-sentential Rhetorical Parsing for Document-level Discourse Analysis

A novel approach for developing a two-stage document-level discourse parser by applying an optimal parsing algorithm to probabilities inferred from two Conditional Random Fields, which significantly outperforms the state of the art.

Abstract

We propose a novel approach for develop-ing a two-stage document-level discourse parser. Our parser builds a discourse tree by applying an optimal parsing algorithm to probabilities inferred from two Con-ditional Random Fields: one for intra-sentential parsing and the other for multi-sentential parsing. We present two ap-proaches to combine these two stages of discourse parsing effectively. A set of empirical evaluations over two different datasets demonstrates that our discourse parser significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, often by a wide margin. 1