Discourse Analysis via Questions and Answers: Parsing Dependency Structures of Questions Under Discussion

Wei-jen Ko, Yating Wu, Cutter Dalton, Dananjay Srinivas, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li

4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse Regular long Paper

TLDR: [***NOTE: This is an ACL Findings paper***]Automatic discourse processing is bottlenecked by data: current discourse formalisms pose highly demanding annotation tasks involving large taxonomies of discourse relations, making them inaccessible to lay annotators. This work instead adopts the linguisti
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Abstract: [***NOTE: This is an ACL Findings paper***]Automatic discourse processing is bottlenecked by data: current discourse formalisms pose highly demanding annotation tasks involving large taxonomies of discourse relations, making them inaccessible to lay annotators. This work instead adopts the linguistic framework of Questions Under Discussion (QUD) for discourse analysis and seeks to derive QUD structures automatically. QUD views each sentence as an answer to a question triggered in prior context; thus, we characterize relationships between sentences as free-form questions, in contrast to exhaustive fine-grained taxonomies. We develop the first-of-its-kind QUD parser that derives a dependency structure of questions over full documents, trained using a large, crowdsourced question-answering dataset DCQA (Ko et al., 2022). Strong human evaluation results show that QUD dependency parsing is highly feasible under this crowdsourced, generalizable annotation scheme. We illustrate how our QUD structure is distinct from RST trees, and demonstrate the utility of QUD analysis in the context of document simplification. Our findings show that QUD parsing is an appealing alternative for automatic discourse processing.