English

Fine-grained Information Status Classification Using Discourse Context-Aware BERT

Computation and Language 2020-11-03 v2

Abstract

Previous work on bridging anaphora recognition (Hou et al., 2013a) casts the problem as a subtask of learning fine-grained information status (IS). However, these systems heavily depend on many hand-crafted linguistic features. In this paper, we propose a simple discourse context-aware BERT model for fine-grained IS classification. On the ISNotes corpus (Markert et al., 2012), our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on fine-grained IS classification, obtaining a 4.8 absolute overall accuracy improvement compared to Hou et al. (2013a). More importantly, we also show an improvement of 10.5 F1 points for bridging anaphora recognition without using any complex hand-crafted semantic features designed for capturing the bridging phenomenon. We further analyze the trained model and find that the most attended signals for each IS category correspond well to linguistic notions of information status.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.14759,
  title  = {Fine-grained Information Status Classification Using Discourse Context-Aware BERT},
  author = {Yufang Hou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.14759},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

accepted at COLING2020. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.04755

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:42:24.457Z