An effective Discourse Parser that uses Rich Linguistic Information

This paper presents a first-order logic learning approach to determine rhetorical relations between discourse segments. Beyond linguistic cues and lexical information, our approach exploits compositional semantics and segment discourse structure data. We report a statistically significant improvement in classifying relations over attribute-value learning paradigms such as Decision Trees, RIPPER and Naive Bayes. For discourse parsing, our modified shift-reduce parsing model that uses our relation classifier significantly outperforms a right-branching majority-class baseline.