English

ESURF: Simple and Effective EDU Segmentation

Computation and Language 2025-01-15 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Segmenting text into Elemental Discourse Units (EDUs) is a fundamental task in discourse parsing. We present a new simple method for identifying EDU boundaries, and hence segmenting them, based on lexical and character n-gram features, using random forest classification. We show that the method, despite its simplicity, outperforms other methods both for segmentation and within a state of the art discourse parser. This indicates the importance of such features for identifying basic discourse elements, pointing towards potentially more training-efficient methods for discourse analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.07723,
  title  = {ESURF: Simple and Effective EDU Segmentation},
  author = {Mohammadreza Sediqin and Shlomo Engelson Argamon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.07723},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:05:18.160Z