Papers › Top-down Discourse Parsing via Sequence Labelling

Top-down Discourse Parsing via Sequence Labelling

3 Feb 2021EACL 2021 2arXiv:2102.02080archive 2025-07-28

Fajri Koto, Jey Han Lau, Timothy Baldwin

We introduce a top-down approach to discourse parsing that is conceptually simpler than its predecessors (Kobayashi et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). By framing the task as a sequence labelling problem where the goal is to iteratively segment a document into individual discourse units, we are able to eliminate the decoder and reduce the search space for splitting points. We explore both traditional recurrent models and modern pre-trained transformer models for the task, and additionally introduce a novel dynamic oracle for top-down parsing. Based on the Full metric, our proposed LSTM model sets a new state-of-the-art for RST parsing.

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Code

fajri91/NeuralRST-TopDown officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

DecoderDiscourse Parsing

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Dynamic Standard Parseval (Full) 50.3 #16 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Dynamic Standard Parseval (Nuclearity) 62.3 #16 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Dynamic Standard Parseval (Relation) 51.5 #16 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Dynamic Standard Parseval (Span) 73.1 #16 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Static Standard Parseval (Full) 49.4 #18 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Static Standard Parseval (Nuclearity) 61.7 #18 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Static Standard Parseval (Relation) 50.5 #18 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT LSTM Static Standard Parseval (Span) 72.7 #18 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (dynamic) Standard Parseval (Full) 49.2 #19 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (dynamic) Standard Parseval (Nuclearity) 60.1 #19 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (dynamic) Standard Parseval (Span) 70.2 #19 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (static) Standard Parseval (Full) 49.0 #20 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (static) Standard Parseval (Nuclearity) 59.9 #20 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (static) Standard Parseval (Relation) 50.6 #20 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Discourse Parsing RST-DT Transformer (static) Standard Parseval (Span) 70.6 #20 of 40 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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