Discovering implicit discourse relations through Brown cluster pair representation and coreference patterns

Abstract

Sentences form coherent relations in a discourse without discourse connectives more frequently than with connectives. Senses of these implicit discourse relations that hold between a sentence pair, however, are challenging to infer. Here, we employ Brown cluster pairs to represent discourse relation and incorporate coreference patterns to identify senses of implicit discourse relations in naturally occurring text. Our system improves the baseline performance by as much as 25%. Feature analyses suggest that Brown cluster pairs and coreference patterns can reveal many key linguistic characteristics of each type of discourse relation. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.