{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/discourse-aware-semantic-self-attention-for","title":"Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention for Narrative Reading Comprehension","arxiv_id":"1908.10721","date":"2019-08-28","proceeding":"IJCNLP 2019 11","authors":["Todor Mihaylov","Anette Frank"],"abstract":"In this work, we propose to use linguistic annotations as a basis for a \\textit{Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention} encoder that we employ for reading comprehension on long narrative texts. We extract relations between discourse units, events and their arguments as well as coreferring mentions, using available annotation tools. Our empirical evaluation shows that the investigated structures improve the overall performance, especially intra-sentential and cross-sentential discourse relations, sentence-internal semantic role relations, and long-distance coreference relations. We show that dedicating self-attention heads to intra-sentential relations and relations connecting neighboring sentences is beneficial for finding answers to questions in longer contexts. Our findings encourage the use of discourse-semantic annotations to enhance the generalization capacity of self-attention models for reading comprehension.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10721v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.10721v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"discourse-aware-semantic-self-attention-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/Heidelberg-NLP/discourse-aware-semantic-self-attention","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reading-comprehension","task_name":"Reading Comprehension"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1908.10721","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}