Implicit discourse relation classification is of great importance for discourse parsing, but remains a challenging problem due to the absence of explicit discourse connectives communicating these relations. Modeling the semantic interactions between the two arguments of a relation has proven useful for detecting implicit discourse relations. However, most previous approaches model such semantic interactions from a shallow interactive level, which is inadequate on capturing enough semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Semantic Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN) to enhance the modeling of inter-argument semantics on a deeper interaction level for implicit discourse relation classification. We first build an interaction graph over representations of the two arguments, and then automatically extract in-depth semantic interactive information through graph convolution. Experimental results on the English corpus PDTB and the Chinese corpus CDTB both demonstrate the superiority of our model to previous state-of-the-art systems.
@article{arxiv.1910.09183,
title = {Semantic Graph Convolutional Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification},
author = {Yingxue Zhang and Ping Jian and Fandong Meng and Ruiying Geng and Wei Cheng and Jie Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09183},
year = {2019}
}