English

A Side-by-side Comparison of Transformers for English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Computation and Language 2023-07-10 v1

Abstract

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.03378,
  title  = {A Side-by-side Comparison of Transformers for English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification},
  author = {Bruce W. Lee and BongSeok Yang and Jason Hyung-Jong Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03378},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

TrustNLP @ ACL 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:24:15.557Z