Papers › Two-pass Discourse Segmentation with Pairing and Global Features

Two-pass Discourse Segmentation with Pairing and Global Features

30 Jul 2014arXiv:1407.8215archive 2025-07-28

Vanessa Wei Feng, Graeme Hirst

Previous attempts at RST-style discourse segmentation typically adopt features centered on a single token to predict whether to insert a boundary before that token. In contrast, we develop a discourse segmenter utilizing a set of pairing features, which are centered on a pair of adjacent tokens in the sentence, by equally taking into account the information from both tokens. Moreover, we propose a novel set of global features, which encode characteristics of the segmentation as a whole, once we have an initial segmentation. We show that both the pairing and global features are useful on their own, and their combination achieved an F₁ of 92.6% of identifying in-sentence discourse boundaries, which is a 17.8% error-rate reduction over the state-of-the-art performance, approaching 95% of human performance. In addition, similar improvement is observed across different classification frameworks.

PaperPDFCode

Code

NLPbox/feng-hirst-service mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Discourse SegmentationSegmentationSentenceVocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections